by Joe Humphrey
As she pulled herself along the desert floor, loose clues about her current state began to pile up, which was helpful considering that she still couldn’t see more than the blinding sunlight and slightly less bright ground in front of her. She could tell that her shirt was gone. She could also feel that her jeans were almost entirely off and bunched around her right foot. Her left shoe was gone but her right shoe was still on and was probably the reason her jeans hadn't come entirely off. She still had her left sock.
There was a grinding, wetness on her thighs that she knew was blood and sand. It was stuck to her legs and face and hands. Her lips were swollen to twice their normal size and split down the middle. Blood was oozing from her mouth in a thick, black string. She screamed again. When her hand made contact with what she recognized as warm, cracked asphalt, she cried and collapsed. Darkness took her again.
- 16 -
Harold sang along with the radio. It was his guilty pleasure. His wife pissed and moaned about the kids these days and how they didn't know what music was, and how no one was going to replace the old real western singers and the crooners. But Hank Williams was dead and Frank Sinatra was making movies and screw em both anyhow. Harold fought in two wars. He'd killed Krauts and Koreans and seen good men, even kids, cut down for this country. He fought (and taken a bayonet in the leg, which ended his military career) to see a future where his own kids could live in a free and righteous America. Ain't no point in any of it if you're not gonna let those kids be what they're gonna be.
He still loved the old music, but he liked the new stuff too. The country and western anyway. Rock and roll he didn't understand, the screaming and thrashing about a lot of these outfits did, but he didn't have nothing to say about it either. Just ain't for him, but he liked someone that can write a song that says something about the world they live in.
Right then he was singing along with Bobbie Gentry about a hooker named Fancy. A lot of the good country songs were about poor white trash, and while Harold certainly didn't consider himself trash, he understood what it meant to be poor and what it meant to be desperate. He liked Fancy’s rise to prestige, and part of him was soft for a good hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold story. Plus the song had a decent hook that he could sing along with. The chorus part anyway. He didn't know all the words to all the parts, but he knew enough.
Halfway through the last chorus Harold nearly ran the girl over. He saw her up ahead, half on and half off the road, and thought she was a dead dog or coyote at first. As he rolled up closer he realized it wasn't an animal at all, but a girl. A naked and bloody teenage girl laying on the side of the road. It wasn't until she raised her head in what looked like a scream, a shaking, pathetic crane at the sky, that it clicked what exactly he was seeing. That's when he nearly drove off the road and right into her. Luckily, he got it together enough to veer the other direction and screech to a halt in front of her.
Harold scrambled out of the truck as quickly as his bad knee would allow, mumbling to himself "Oh Jesus... oh lord Jesus..." over and over. Running to her, he stumbled and nearly fell when she suddenly screamed again, her shaking hands hovering over the sides of her head.
"Shhh, honey, shhh... it'll be okay. Jesus Christ... it'll be okay..."
Harold couldn't make up his mind between trying to comfort her and being horrified at whatever animal could have done this to a human being. A little girl no less. He could tell immediately by looking at her what had happened. Some of it anyway.
She was just a tiny thing, and while Harold had difficulty lifting her, he was able to pile her into the passenger side of his truck. She fell over on the bench seat and Harold tucked her legs in and slammed the door. He could see the trail she'd left across the desert. It looked like she'd crawled seventy feet. He could see the black puddle of blood where she must have been dumped. A knapsack and some random stuff were scattered around that area. He looked at her lying in the seat and briefly contemplated what he should do. He ran out to the spot and picked up the knapsack. On the ground were empty candy wrappers and a half-empty bottle of soda. There was also a torn shirt and her other shoe. He grabbed the torn shirt and the shoe and ran back to the truck, taking notice of the mile marker he'd just passed so he'd know where to tell the police that he'd found her.
As he drove, he stroked her hair. She was unconscious and he was pretty sure she was going to die before they got to the hospital. He kept telling her that it was going to be okay, occasionally peppering it with "Jesus Christ" and “Please Lord Jesus.”
It had been a long time since he'd seen something so awful, and Harold had seen a lot of awful things.
- 17 -
In the darkness, Charlie was aware of the fact that someone was speaking, possibly to her, though there was no way she was going to be able to manage anything close to talking back. She could barely string together two thoughts, even fewer words.
The world swam downward as she noticed that she was being carried. She was placed on a soft leathery cushion. The coolness of it against her cheek was soothing. The gentle rocking of the old truck’s suspension brought back sense memories that swam through her head. Good memories of riding the bus. Of laying down in the back of her mother's car and sleeping. The smell of the car imprinted on her mind. For the rest of Charlie’s life (and afterlife) the smell of loose tobacco and hand-rolled cigarettes comforted her in a way she didn’t understand.
The world shook and she could tell that she was moving. The soothing voice floated around but never quite came together into something she could understand. She felt someone stroking her hair. It hurt but made her feel safe and that was far more important.
Charlie passed out again. She was consumed by a darkness that never entirely left her.
- 18-
They wouldn't leave. She'd told them everything she could remember, which wasn't much, but they kept asking her. Over and over again. What did he look like? What kind of car did he drive? Did he give a name? Did he say where he was going or where he was from? Was there more than one?
Charlie didn't know the answer to any of their questions. All she wanted was to sleep. The nurse doped her up with a generosity that she was grateful for. The last nine hours were a hell she wanted desperately to forget, the same way she had forgotten what had caused her injuries.
The hell started with the cleaning, stitching, and bandaging of her many wounds. She was torn inside and could have died except for one sickeningly ironic twist. The assailant (which is what they called him) had, in what was likely an act of degradation, stuffed her ripped panties inside her. This is what most likely saved Charlie from bleeding to death. It was bad. Really bad. The tear inside her required an emergency operation and, later, reconstructive surgery.
Other wounds that needed tending included bite marks on her breasts, back, thighs, and butt, the head wound from the initial hit with the pipe (which gave her a brutal concussion, split her scalp but didn't fracture her skull), her broken molar, her bottom lip which needed to be sewn back together, and minor cuts and scrapes, some of which came from her crawling to the road. Most of the damage to her face had come from his fists.
A battery of cops came through to talk to her. State troopers, a sheriff, and a detective. All asked basically the same series of questions, with varying degrees of sensitivity. She’d told them everything she could remember, which was very little. That she’d been hitchhiking. That she’d seen a white Cadillac. The scent of vanilla and The Monkees, and that was it. Most of all, she knew that her body felt destroyed and she had no idea where she was or how she was going to get home and that through all the aches and pains, she longed most for her mother.
And mother was on her way.
CHAPTER TWO
- 1 -
Charlie’s jeans wouldn’t snap. She sucked her belly in and yanked at the waistband, but the two metal pieces refused to meet. Standing sideways in front of the mirror over her dresser, she peered at her stomach. It didn’t look bigger. Not really. Sometimes when s
he was about to have her period, her hands and face would swell slightly, and her stomach was occasionally tender, but her periods were unpredictable under the best circumstances. She thought that could be the problem. There were times she’d go two or three months without menstruating. Dr. Ballard, their family physician, was never particularly concerned about it. He said that it would work itself out as she got older and Charlie wanted to believe him, though usually when she finally got her period, she suffered through agonizing cramps that often kept her out of school for days.
She sucked at her bottom lip and pressed her tongue against the scar that ran up the center. This was something she did often, alternating between the scar and the hole where her tooth had been. While she couldn’t remember much of her hitchhiking experience (and nothing of the man who attacked her, or the attack itself) she got a feeling of unsettled dizziness when she focused on these physical remnants. Obviously, something happened, and she certainly remembered the weeks of recovery and the operation to repair the internal damage. Yet all she could muster in the way of remembering the event itself was a general unease and a big empty crater in her history. Like the hole in her mouth where her tooth once lived.
Because of the nature of her attack and the scope of damage inflicted in that particular area of her body, she wasn’t surprised that her cycle hadn’t stumbled back into her life yet. She placed a hand against her stomach and pressed softly. Her bladder shouted a warning and she pulled away, watching the way her belly jiggled in the mirror. Not particularly fat, but a little distended. Swollen. If she was on the verge of a monster period (as she suspected she might be) then it wasn’t unreasonable that she’d be a little swollen and sensitive to touch. Reaching between her shoulder blades, she unclasped her bra and watched as her breasts fell into their natural, comfortable place. She cupped the right one and ran her fingers along the bottom. For a few weeks after the incident, a dotted half-moon bruise and scab vandalized the soft, pale skin there. It was a bite mark. There were a few of them, but the one on her breast was the one that bothered her most. She felt for a scar and found the skin smooth and unspoiled, milky white compared to the dark tan and light scattering of freckles on her arms and face. The breast was tender and heavier than normal. She held the other one and gauged its weight. They’d always been small but at the moment they were full and taut, like ripe fruit, ready to burst. Again, this could very well have been a symptom of a heavy period that was looming behind her like a fairytale troll.
The jeans were a lost cause. She tossed them into the closet with a frustrated huff and began the defeated act of sorting through the dresses her mother still made for her and she rarely wore outside of church. She pulled a cornflower blue sundress from the closet and held it up. The fabric was covered in little pale yellow dots. She’d worn it a couple of times but found it matronly and entirely inappropriate for any sort of social situation she actually wanted to participate in. It reminded her of the ugly prairie dresses some of the more traditional Mormon girls wore. She held it to her front, letting it drape over her legs. The hem landed at the middle of her shin. To put it plainly, it was hideously old-fashioned.
She sat down at her mother’s sewing corner with a pair of scissors and a few carefully chosen spools of thread and had to fight a wave of nausea that washed over her. For a moment she thought she might vomit all over Rose's old Singer, but with her eyes shut and her hands held at her chest in a tight little ball, the feeling passed and she was able to get started.
- 2 -
Charlie strutted through the house, reveling in the way the light fabric bounced around her hips, stopping an inch above her knee. She’d taken a foot and a half of cloth from the bottom of the dress and hemmed it. She also opened the neckline and, using the excess material from the bottom, gave herself wide but attractive shoulder straps. The sleeves came off entirely. The dress was not only presentable but even cute. She sashayed down the hall to her bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror. It was feminine and perhaps a little vintage, but not old-fashioned. Not in the embarrassing way it was before. The dress reminded her of swing dancing and Bill Haley and His Comets. Rock Around the Clock or Shake Rattle and Roll. It was a startlingly different look for her, but examining herself in the mirror, she found something about it familiar.
Twirling, she spun across her room, the dress parachuting up almost to her waist. She dropped down onto her knees in front of the milk crate that contained the LPs her mother let her keep. She thumbed past Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline and The Andrews Sisters, pausing momentarily at Elvis is Back! before settling on a Buddy Holly “Best Of” album. She took a moment to look at his awkward, grinning, bespectacled face before slipping the black disc out of the cardboard sleeve.
When she was four or five, Charlie told her mother she would marry Buddy Holly one day. Charlie could still remember the day, a few months later, when her mother sat her down to tell her that Buddy had died, but that he was in heaven with Jesus. It was the first time Charlie learned about death and it didn’t sit well with her at all. Through near hysterics, she told her mother that she wanted to die so she could be with him. That’s when Rose’s sympathy turned to anger. She told Charlie that suicide was the worst sin a person could commit and even said it would turn God’s most vengeful face your way.
The following summer had been an almost non-stop barrage of Buddy Holly music on the radio (and, to a lesser extent, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper) which had made getting over Buddy’s death that much more difficult for five-year-old Charlotte Lukin. By the fall, she was done listening to her Buddy Holly records and she hadn’t actively listened to him since.
When she dropped the needle onto the spinning black circle and heard the twirling guitar twang of That’ll Be the Day, Charlie closed her eyes and smiled. Buddy Holly may be dead, but she was not. She ran her tongue along the scar on her lip. It was still a little sensitive and when she pressed it, she could make it hurt even more. This was something she did from time to time, and it always sent an uncomfortable but compelling shudder through her body.
Leaning her head back, she let her hair spill across her back and her hips swing with the music. She walked back across her bedroom and ran the palm of her hand down her stomach, pressing the fabric against her skin, then shook her head. No, she wasn’t putting on weight. It was her period. Or it was the unorthodox diet of cinnamon toast and Dr. Pepper she’d been on lately. Or it was in her head entirely. Maybe her jeans shrank in the wash. It could be anything or nothing at all.
Thinking about it stressed her out and gave her anxiety, fluttering in her chest, so she closed her eyes and rocked her head along with the music. When she looked at the mirror again, she noticed her face. There were dark hollows under her eyes and her cheeks had a puffy, unhealthy quality to them, as though she had a cold. She gathered up her hair in each hand in loose pigtails and leaned forward. The scar on her lip was noticeable and she suppressed an urge to bite down on the lip until her teeth ground together and blood ran down her chin. She could see it in her head with vivid clarity. Biting and sucking, tearing and spitting the useless piece of flesh against the mirror with a limp splat. The way her chin would look covered in blood, leading up to the wet, ravaged mess of her exposed jaw, a row of shining ivory pegs poking out of the red gore that was once her mouth.
Shaking this off, she pulled her hair down over her face. It was long, boring and she hated it. She'd had the same haircut since she was a child. Shoulder length, somewhere between brown and blonde, straight and utterly predictable. Another dark impulse rose in her, not entirely unlike her compulsion to chew off her own lip. This impulse she indulged.
Quickly and without much forethought, she slipped out of the dress, grabbed a comb and her mother’s sewing scissors, and started cutting. Carefully and deliberately, but with a sense of recklessness that was new and made her heart race.
Ten minutes later, Charlie’s hair was significantly shorter, falling to the middle of her neck and curling u
p at her eye-line in wispy, slightly uneven bangs. She shook her head, watching stray hair fall around her naked body in a cloud. The new style framed her face in a way it never had before and made her look almost like a different person. A smile crawled across her mouth that was nearly a snarl, and completed the image of this unrecognizable girl. This felt right. It felt honest and she sucked on her lip again, running her tongue across the scar. The scar and the hole where her tooth wasn’t.
Charlie’s mother was going to lose her mind when she saw what she’d done, but she didn't care about that. Whatever this feeling was, the feeling of reclaiming her identity that came with cutting away the hair and carving a new head out for herself, it was worth whatever blow-back she faced when Rose got home from the dry cleaner.
- 3 -
The shower was hot and wonderful. It amazed her how different her head felt under the water with so much of her hair gone. She ran her fingers across her scalp over and over, giggling at the way they slipped out into nothingness only a few inches from her head, instead of tangling in the cascade of thick locks she was used to shampooing. The water was warmer than she typically took it but for the moment she enjoyed the pain as it beat into her back and ran down her legs. It seemed like a deeper cleanse. As though rinsing away all that loose hair was pulling down the cobwebs from her mind. She turned and let the hot water spray onto her face. It was nearly more than she could handle and she fought the temptation to turn away. Without much thought, she reached up and gripped the steel pipe that led into the shower-head from the wall. It scalded her hand and she pressed her forehead against the wall, her eyes squeezed shut, still gripping the pipe as it burned her palm and fingers.
