Present Tense

by Gil Hogg

  “When you identify the attackers, we’ll hang a substantial claim on them. You may need plastic surgery.”

  As Flynn was putting his papers in his briefcase and preparing to go, I asked him how he found me.

  “Oh, I look into this ward every so often and have a cup of coffee with the ward sister.”

  He gave me a strong smile and I felt more at ease.

  A week later I identified Dwight Chadwin and Duane Schultz from a line-up at the police precinct. I heard that they admitted they were the two after questioning. I had been in a dazed state since the rape happened. I couldn’t feel anything. I was observing what was happening around me without being able to intervene. Flynn came to see me at home, and said he was going to make the rich daddies pay.

  My father was grimly silent. I think he felt shamed personally by what had happened to his daughters. In his heart he believed Grace and I had gone willingly in the car. He thought, as the cops inferred, that we were at fault. He didn’t have a wife to share his confidences, or modify his masculine impulses. He hadn’t found a companion since my mother’s death ten years before. He was out of work, and seldom saw his old buddies from the Stony Bend plant, where he used to be a spray-painter. He used to sit for hours in the apartment, in the dark, watching television, sipping beer, and growing a paunch. But the mention of the damages suit energised him, and he and Flynn spent time talking about how much money was in issue.

  I met prosecuting attorney Bronstein at the District Attorney’s office, and he echoed the scepticism of the police. The only thing that seemed to impress him favourably was the medical evidence that both Grace and I had been virgins before the attack.

  A few weeks after the disaster of the court hearing, Desmond Flynn called at the apartment and talked to my father. They were together half an hour. Then my father called me in and told me to sign a document settling my claim for $5,000. Although I felt this was wrong, my father and Flynn insisted. Flynn had changed his tune, but not his jovial plausibility.

  “Sign and take the money while you can, my dear girl. It’s a good settlement. There’s a lot of dispute about what happened, and you might do worse in court.”

  “I don’t mind going to court,” I protested.

  “Ah, yes, but that costs a lot of money. These families are big politically, and they’ll fight. I can’t work for free,” Flynn said.

  I asked about Grace’s money, and Flynn said he was dealing with that for a similar amount. So I signed the form. The case was over, but not the pain.

  The sun had broken through more strongly at Chateaugay, and painted the far end of the lake a glaring white.

  “Did you ever hear of a lawyer named Desmond Flynn? He was the ambulance chaser who added me to his client list in the emergency ward, and filed a suit for damages.”

  “That kinda thing was handled by my father,” Chadwin said wearily.

  “Yeah, well he did a job. The money we got was derisory.”

  “You want money now?”

  “Don’t be like that. I’m just telling you.”

  I hadn’t moved Chadwin any closer to understanding the consquences of his acts because all the forces around him had moved to soften the effects. He had no idea of the harm that had been done to Grace. When she came out of hospital, the only person she felt at ease with was me. My father didn’t understand, almost resented a disabled daughter. He used to stare silently at her with eyes that were deep in their sockets of worry.

  I knew I would have to look after Grace, and I planned to get a job in Trenton, NJ and take her with me. I wanted to get away from my father, from his personal misery and self pity, and from the reproachful way he treated us, two soiled women. Grace resumed her domestic work at the apartment, while I worked as a trainee secretary at the Lindos plant, which made steel pressings for General Motors. At the same time I was studying accountancy at night, and making plans to move to Trenton. I was going with a girlfriend from Lindos. We were going to share an apartment, with Grace to look after us. In this period at home before we were ready to move, Grace became silent, haunted.

  One night I came home at quarter to seven as usual. My father wasn’t there. He usually hung around the local pool hall until eight. This was a time when I could spend some leisure with Grace, doing things in the apartment together, helping with the cooking, talking a little.

  As soon as I let myself in I knew something was wrong. The lights were off, the rooms in the deep shadow of surrounding buildings. There was no smell of cooking. I could hear the filtered sounds of the neighbours’ children and radios. I called Grace’s name and went to her bedroom. The bed was neatly made but the woolly bear which usually sat on her pillow wasn’t there. I thought she’d run away. And then I heard an unusual sound. Water running. Not the neighbours’ plumbing. Yes, it was running water. The bathroom door was in front of me. I pushed it open. All I could see for a moment was that the bath was full of black water. The tap was on, and water was running through the overflow vent. I switched on the light to see Grace’s naked body under blood red water, and the teddy bear floating on the surface.

  “God, that’s awful,” Chadwin said. “I didn’t know that, but you can’t blame me.”

  The word-pictures were dim and distant for him. “Yes, you are to blame. She was over six months pregnant, and she miscarried in the emergency unit.”

  Chadwin considered this for a moment, surprised, and then dismissed it. “OK, sure. Like you say.”

  He rose from the chair, stretching and yawning, a beast preparing to move. I stood up with a cold realisation that the moment had come. He wasn’t used to accounting for anything outside the prosaic responsibilities of business, and he wasn’t used to being held up by a woman.

  “Now let’s seal our little chat with a friendly kiss,” he simpered, stepping toward me, clamping his large hands on my upper arms. He held me tight at arm’s length.

  “Oh, come on, Loren. You’ve got a neurosis about all this. It’s like I said. You won’t admit what you really want. And it’ll be therapeutic. It’ll release all the shit that’s blocking you up. And you owe me one for all the grief you’ve caused.”

  He was drawing me toward him, the puce face, the shark teeth, the flaring gold hair, the silver eyes. Instead of calming him, the nauseating story had stimulated him. He was throbbing. He crushed my mouth and breasts and thighs to him.

  9

  I didn’t resist Chadwin when he grabbed me. I didn’t speak. I had said everything to him. Words could not save me. I didn’t cry out. Nobody would hear me. My veins had turned to bile. I had to change my tactic completely to avoid Chadwin carrying me inside, and throwing me on a bed. I had to give myself an opportunity to overcome his physical strength.

  “OK, maybe you’re right. I’m hung up,” I said, weakly.

  “You surely are, kid,” he gasped.

  “Look, let’s go inside.”

  “Yeah, do it properly,” he breathed, sliding the patio door, and thrusting me through.

  “If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll get us a drink. I’ve remembered, there is a bottle of bourbon.”

  “Holding out on me, huh?”

  “Not any more. Just let me go, so I can get it.”

  “I knew you’d see sense. You’re a smart girl.”

  He followed me closely while I fished the bottle out of the lounge cabinet, poured hefty slugs, and fetched ice from the freezer, and put it in a bucket.

  “Now you’re being a nice girl,” he said, ramming his body close to me from behind while I mixed the drinks, pawing my breasts, working himself up.

  I was thinking that the bottle might be a weapon, if I could get into the right position to swing it. And there was a baseball bat, which Greg and the twins used to play with, in the clothes closet, in the hall. I could not get to the bat while Chadwin was shadowing my every step. The kitchen drawer was full of knives, but I wasn’t confident enough with them. Chadwin might turn the knife on me.

  “The bedroo
m’s through here,” I said, walking ahead with the bottle, two glasses and the ice-bucket on a tray.

  I led him to the spare bedroom. The bed, where I had intended to sleep later, was made up with pale blue sheets.

  “Very inviting,” Chadwin said, dropping his jacket on a chair, and slurping his drink heavily, but making sure I didn’t get out of reach, by blocking my way.

  “Let me go to the bathroom for a moment, will you?”

  “I’ll be waiting outside.”

  I went into the ensuite room. There was nothing in here in the way of a weapon except surgical scissors; but the sharp points scared me. I looked at myself in the mirror; a woman with a waxen face, a mussed ponytail, and sweat glistening below the hairline. If there was another way to deal with this man, I couldn’t think of it. I used the perfume atomiser automatically, let my hair loose, and brushed it a couple of times.

  “What in hell are you doing, Loren? Taking it out of mothballs?” Chadwin yelled.

  “Pig!” I said under my breath, and went out. “Let me get you another drink.”

  Chadwin’s bad-tempered glare melted when he saw my hair, and smelt me. “Hey, you are something, baby.”

  He followed closely while I refilled his glass, unable to wait. “C’mon, before I die.”

  His lust was so overpowering that he could believe that somebody who had expressed only repulsion toward him, could now enjoy him. I put the bottle back on the tray which rested on the table by the bed. Now wasn’t the moment to try to hit him. Not while he was on his feet. Chadwin pushed me towards the bed, kicking off his shoes and trousers, and unbuttoning his shirt. I was calculating how I could pick up the bottle by the neck and get a clear swing at him.

  Chadwin gulped the whole drink, put down the glass, and fell on the bed, pulling me down with him. I was engulfed by his thickly muscled red gold arms and his hard body. He rolled on top of me, writhing, his lips and tongue wetting my face. I retreated into an inner darkness. He was pushing and grunting and thrusting at me, but it was all happening out there, in parts of me I hardly owned. I writhed with hatred. Chadwin took my agony for passion. His urge for self-satisfaction was so strong that I might as well have been a plastic doll – or a corpse.

  He was tearing at my clothes, groaning, fumbling between my legs like a pastrycook kneading dough. His open eyes were blind. He uttered the first poetic words of this close encounter.

  “I want it, baby, real bad!”

  His filthy grunting only strengthened my resolve. He reared up, kneeling between my legs, intending to pull my jeans and pants off. I was free, for a second, to reach out for the whiskey bottle beside the bed. Chadwin’s movements were so aggressive, that my arm jerked as I tried to close my fingers over the neck of the bottle. The bottle crashed to the floor, taking the tray, glasses and ice-bucket with it. Chadwin only laughed, thinking I was throwing my arms about in ecstasy. The bottle – my prospective weapon – had come to rest on its side a yard from the bed. He read the pain on my face as pleasure.

  When Chadwin moved to one side of my legs to drag my jeans down, his weight was off me for a moment, and I thrust myself sideways, out of the bed, falling on to the floor, and felt fragments of broken glass stab into my hands and feet.

  “Whatinhell?” Chadwin said, befuddled for a moment.

  I reached across the floor, and grabbed the neck of the bottle. I reared up on my knees. Chadwin was still half lying on the bed. I hit him across the ear with the bottle, but he merely shook his head.

  “Fucking hell!” he shouted, an arm up to protect himself.

  I fell back on the floor. I had missed my chance. Chadwin threw himself off the bed, towards me, his throat swelled with bellows of fury; but the fury turned into a cry of agony. He had stamped his foot down on the base of a broken whiskey glass. Sharp slivers of crystal, sticking up from the base, had stabbed into his foot. He reared back in pain, sitting on the floor. He looked helplessly at the knives of glass buried deep in his flesh. I jumped up, and swung the bottle at him again. The bottle connected with his head. Again he shook his head, confused for a few seconds. I was fired up now. I wasn’t afraid. I was going to fight the bastard, and give him what he gave me in the back of the Bel Air.

  “You mad bitch!” he shouted, reaching out for me, clamping a hand on one of my ankles and drawing me toward him, trying to drag me down.

  He attempted to protect his head by pulling me close to him. I rammed the base of the bottle down on the crown of his head. He released his hold a little, groggy. I tore myself away. I had a chance now to aim the bottle hard at him, like a club. It exploded on his forehead, spraying glass and the remains of the bourbon everywhere. Chadwin’s arms dropped, and he flopped back on the floor.

  I ran out of the room, grabbed the baseball bat from the hall alcove, and went back. Chadwin was groaning, hoisting himself up on his elbows. I had a measured swing at him with the bat. It struck the side of his head, over his ear, with a bony thunk. He went down, unconscious.

  I only spent a moment looking at the blood and glass around us, and at Chadwin’s limp body. I ran out of the bedroom, and downstairs to the workshop. I feared that if Chadwin came to, and had a chance to get at me, he’d beat me to pulp as well as rape me. I took two coils of plastic cord off the pegs above the workbench. Greg used the cord, which was strong enough to tow a car, on the sailboats, and he had taught me how to tie sailors’ knots. I ran back upstairs. Chadwin was on his side. I turned him on to his belly with difficulty. I trussed his wrists together behind his back first; then his ankles. He was becoming conscious, moaning. For additional security, I bent his legs, and tied his ankles to his wrists with the surplus cord. He was like a turkey ready for roasting.

  “I’m going to kill you, you murderous bitch,” he slurred.

  I didn’t believe that. He’d only do the next worst thing. I backed away from him, satisfied that I was safe for the moment. The room reeked of whisky and blood and the French perfume I had squirted on my hair. I closed the door. I had survived.

  I ran into the kitchen, and clutched the telephone to ring the police and Greg. The line was dead. I pressed the buttons on the phone. Silence. I went through to the phone in the dining room, but it was dead too. The broadband modem next to the computer had been torn away from its connections. At some point when I was fiddling with drinks, Chadwin had taken this precaution. And at Chateaugay there was no coverage for my mobile phone.

  10

  Think. I had to think. I slumped in my special seat by the window. I felt tired, my limbs heavy, and aching as though I’d done a hard day’s physical work. The soles of my feet prickled with the pain of the broken glass. My breasts, I could see, when I eased up my sweater, were red and blue. I had an absolute conviction that I couldn’t have acted otherwise to save myself. I had a tiny, and perhaps impermanent glow of satisfaction at having triumphed, at last, over this man who had violated my life. Then I felt a weight of exhaustion, of hopelessness. I must have passed out for a few seconds, or perhaps minutes. The next sound I heard was somebody ringing the doorbell.

  I came out of my chair as if I was on a spring, and went into the bedroom. Chadwin had heard the bell, and he began to shout. I pushed one of my handkerchiefs into his mouth and tied an old scarf around his head, ran back to the kitchen, and switched on the radio. It was KWTR which is mostly rock music, and I turned up the volume. I needed the police desperately, but I didn’t necessarily want to involve just anybody who called at the door. I wanted time to think what to do. I wanted time to clean up the bedroom.

  I could see the shape of a man in the frosted glass of the front door as I went through the hall. He was wearing a county official’s wide-brimmed felt hat.

  “Hold it a minute!” I yelled.

  I went into the main bedroom, and took my bloody jeans and sweater off and slipped into an old green velour track-suit. It took only a few moments to do that. By the time I got to the door, the visitor was walking away. I could have kept quiet and
let him go, but there was a chance he could help me.

  “Sorry to keep you. Just doing a bit of cleaning, you know,” I said loudly as I opened the door.

  “That’s all right lady,” the man said, turning, and I recognised the pest control badge, with the name ‘Earl Rovnik’ stitched on it. He was the rat-catcher, and not exactly a figure of authority who could relieve my cares.

  “I’m working round here now, and I thought you might like the loan of these,” he said, holding up two traps.

  I told him I’d leave the trapping to him.

  “I’ll be hereabouts a while, and you’ll end up good and clean.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  He pointed down toward the forecourt. “Saw your husband come past a while back. Always notice them fancy foreign cars.”

  Chadwin’s Jaguar stood in front of the garages.

  I thanked him, and he paused as he turned away. He was looking at my right hand. “You hurt yourself bad, lady?”

  My hand was bright with blood. “Snagged it in the workshop. Nothing really.”

  I closed the door, and saw him walk slowly away. I leaned on the door for the moment. I could have told him what happened. I could have handed Chadwin over to him. But I was still confused. And wary. I was worried about the liquor and perfume in the bedroom. The radio was racketing so loudly I couldn’t think.

  I turned down the volume. I made myself a strong cup of coffee, and sipped it without milk or sugar. I felt calmer after I’d finished the drink. It was very obvious that I couldn’t simply release Chadwin, and hope he’d go away. The man had a strange compulsion. He would have to be handed to the police, roped up, and I’d have to face an investigation, and perhaps, the way these things went, be regarded by some with suspicion. What I had to do was to lessen that possibility by cleaning up the house – the blood, the glass, the spilt liquor. I was beginning to feel more composed. I simply had to use my head. If Greg had been at home, I could have asked him to come to Chateaugay immediately, but that option wasn’t open. I couldn’t have called him from here anyway.