Deadweight

by Robert Devereaux

  DEADITE PRESS

  205 NE BRYANT

  PORTLAND, OR 97211

  www.DEADITEPRESS.com

  AN ERASERHEAD PRESS COMPANY

  www.ERASERHEADPRESS.com

  ISBN: 1-62105-046-7

  Deadweight copyright 2012 by Robert Devereaux

  Cover art copyright © 2012 Alan M. Clark

  www.ALANMCLARK.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Printed in the USA.

  PROLOGUE

  GOOD FRIDAY 1970

  “Sweetpea, that crumpled bag of potting soil, the one that’s just about empty, would you bring it to me please?” The light in the greenhouse glowed rich and spacious high above Karin’s head and out beyond her grandmother. There was magic in the air, filling the greenhouse like helium fills a balloon. Long Island always seemed more vast to Karin than all of upstate New York did, mostly because of the way her head bloomed here in Granny’s greenhouse.

  “Okay,” said Karin, loving the way Granny Eva looked at her. Her large crinkly eyes made Karin feel as airy as angels. Lifting the bag by its torn top, holding it away from her new coveralls, she felt it uncurl with unexpected weight.

  “Thank you, lovely lady.” Granny set the bag beside her tray of seedlings, reached inside, withdrew fists full of dark soil, dark as coffee grounds, which she fingered around the fragile plants and tamped down with her thumbs. “You know,” she said, her hands moving from one plant to the next, her voice grown not angry but firm nonetheless and full of wisdom, “it’s not my place to say anything, and you mustn’t tell your father I did,”—Granny’s eyes filled with concern and Karin shook her head to assure her—“but it’s a shame how he treats you, how he treats both of you. I’ve seen the bruises and said nothing in all these years. But you’re getting bigger now. Your mother made her choice, and it was a bad one. She could still undo it, though she has a hard time realizing that. What I’m trying to say is—oh, come hug your grandma!”

  Karin saw Granny’s eyes moisten. Then her own eyes teared up. She thought of Grandpa Borchert, crook-nosed and stern in his chair by the fire, his hair a wild white swirl atop his head, his spine stiff as a tomato stake in Granny’s garden. Grandpa’s eyes gleamed with winter fire like her daddy’s eyes. Her daddy blundered around their house like a bear, big and dark and loud. He struck her mother when he felt like it, which was nearly every night. Lately, he had taken to striking Karin too, shifting from mother to child as though they occupied one body. Karin fell now into her grandmother’s embrace, heard her speak through tears: “You have a choice too, that’s what I’m trying to say. Don’t lose yourself. Resist when you can. Draw lines. Always keep a place that’s all your own, a private place where no hurt can come to you.”

  Karin verged on tears but Granny’s body felt too good for that. She smelled of bread ovens and loam and her big arms gave worlds of comfort. “Thank you, Granny,” was all Karin could say, her heart overflowing with love.

  Granny released her, yet the press of Granny’s egg-blue smock still tingled on her cheek. “I have a present for you,” Granny said, daubing at her eyes with one half-rolled sleeve and reaching into a secret cache below. A smile broke over her wide wrinkled face. “Early Easter,” she said. “Easter’s early this year anyway, I never like it coming in March like this, so I have a special gift for you, two days in advance.”

  Karin knew it would be a rose, a miniature rose, but it was one thing to know it and another to see it emerge from beneath Granny’s workbench, to watch Granny treat it like caught sunlight, to hear her caress it with her words and see her fingertips play among its petals. The single bloom sat proudly atop its stem like a perfect strawberry, though pale, which, having decided to transform one day into a rose, smoothed out its pocks and unfurled itself like wood shavings dyed in light pink, still tight with pride, still moist with beads of strawberry juice. “It’s beautiful, Granny.”

  “It’s a Fresh Pink,” Granny told her, “for your fresh young face, my Karin, and your pig-pink cheeks.” She gave it like a new kitten from her palms into Karin’s, speaking her catechism as to its care and feeding. Karin nodded as though she were hearing the words for the first time, but she focused on the rose, letting the perfect curve of its petals teach her fingers how to worship it, how to give it back life in abundance.

  Karin had been blessed with the magic touch, Granny always said, just like Granny herself but not like Karin’s mother. Karin was green not only in her thumbs but in all her fingers and toes and throughout her body, in sympathy with the plant world like those Findhorn folks who claimed to talk with Pan and the vegetative spirits.

  ***

  Later that day, in the disquiet of Grandpa Borchert’s den, her daddy suddenly took it into his head to drag her and her mother out of the unbearable clamp of silence into the waning sunlight for an enforced stroll about the farm. He was full of words about taking the place over some day, getting rid of the nursery (it brought too many strangers out to the place, never knew when one of them would steal you blind), tearing down the greenhouse, growing something useful in its place. They had paused near the farmhouse, beside the ancient oak with its tire swing.

  Karin’s mom, thinking her husband was joking, started poking fun at him. She’d never seen him grow anything but fatter, she told him. Besides, she didn’t think her folks had plans to die any time soon. She had more to say, but Daddy smacked the back of her head so that her long hair went flying. Then he whirled her about and swatted her across the face. “Don’t you ever call me fat,” he said, “never, never, never,” and each never was another slap.

  Karin didn’t know what got into her then. Maybe it was Granny’s words of encouragement that afternoon. Maybe it was the fact that Easter weekend on the farm had always been a safety zone: Daddy had never struck either of them here, not even his wife in the privacy of the guest room, sound carried so in Granny’s house. Whatever the reason, she lashed out at her father now—with her fists and her words—flailing away with all the zeal at her command.

  Daddy seized her by the upper arms, pulled her tight to his chest, and hurtled her away from him, her progress stopped by the brutal whack of the tree trunk at her back. An instant later the oak slammed into her skull, made her jaws clack together on the sides of her tongue. Crushed bitterness opened in her mouth. Then Granny burst past Karin on her left, going for Karin’s daddy. “Stop that, stop it!” she bellowed, wrenching at his shoulders. His blows were striking her mommy, who sobbed and keened but took them about her face and upper body as if they were what she deserved.

  Daddy wheeled on Granny Eva. “You want a taste of it too, old girl?” She backed off, wiping her mouth with the edge of her hand. “Come on, come and get it, you’ll love it, just like these two.”

  “You’re sick, William, sick in the head,” Granny told him, backing off, trying to keep him away with the magic of her outstretched hands. There was anger in her voice, yes, and fear, and Karin had never heard either one come from her grandmother before, not like this. “May the Good Lord strike you dead for hurting my—”

  Karin yelled “No!” a fraction of a second too late. Daddy’s sharp jab took the old woman square in the belly, sank deep, then out. As she doubled over, he backhanded her across the face. She whirled about, grabbed for the tire swing but missed it, set it spinning. She collapsed to the hard-packed earth, struggling for breath.

  Karin ran to her, knelt beside her under the hail of her father’s invective. The strength she’d always relied upon in her gran
dmother’s face was gone. Instead she saw there a puffier, more wrinkled copy of her mother’s face: same panic, same pain, a little-girl look in her eyes.

  Daddy clamped Karin’s arm tight, lifted her as though to rip it from its socket. Mommy cowered and wept behind him. “Pack your suitcase,” he said, eyes on fire, “we’re leaving.”

  “But what about Easter?” Karin protested, aware even as she asked it how absurd her question was.

  “Fuck Easter,” he said, grabbing his wife by the belt and booting her backside toward the house. “Fuck this farm and fuck the ugly old bitch that grows her fucking petunias on it. We’re going home, and when we get there I’m going to teach you not to sass your old man. Now shut your fucking hole and get moving.” He stumbled her along up the back stoop and into the house, shoving her halfway across the kitchen.

  Karin turned and sprinted up the high narrow steps to her attic room, still feeling the throb of the tree trunk bruising her back and the vise grip of Daddy’s hand on her arm. She hoped—and immediately hated herself for hoping it—that when they got home he would hit Mommy first and for a long time, so that when he came to Karin, his hands would be tired and she wouldn’t hurt so much the next day.

  Then she burst into tears at the memory of Granny Eva curled up helpless beside the tall oak. Suddenly the fury of her father’s voice rang like thunder in her ears: “You up there, little girl, can it or I’ll wale the fucking tar out of you. You be ready in five minutes or you are dead, you hear me?”

  ***

  It was a warm night but the windows were closed, the blinds drawn. Daddy always kept all the blinds drawn.

  Karin wished she were up in Granny’s attic room now, looking at her new rose under the moonlight that fanned in from the peaked window. Instead she lay quietly trembling under the covers at home, her drab room enlivened only by the flowers she’d bought or grown out back, and she could barely make out, by the weak light that stole through the slats, the tiny rose sitting in its pot on her nightstand. She reached out through the noise of her father’s violence and her mother’s pleadings and ran a finger along the soft cool silk of its furls.

  She heard Mommy’s sobs fall away. The last staccato bursts of Daddy’s anger fired randomly through the night. Her stomach tensed. When their door slammed, it took her as always by surprise. Then came his impatient footsteps in the hall, as if he couldn’t wait to pound her, and her door suddenly wrenched open.

  Turning away from the glare of the hall light, Karin saw her rose, shocked on the nightstand. It seemed to be coated in a glaze of pink ice. Daddy filled the doorway. Then he was inside, moving toward her bed, wearing his big green woolen bathrobe, holding in one hand an old towel of the kind Mommy used for dusting. Karin felt relieved: It was strange that Daddy was already in his pajamas, but at least there would be no wide leather belt tonight. Unless he had it coiled in the pocket of his robe, she would be spared the welts it raised on her rump.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said, trying to come in under his anger, diffuse it, soften it before he got started.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it,” he said, pacing at the foot of her bed, holding the white towel like a limp bludgeon. “You’ve been sorry before, just like your fucking mother, but somehow it never seems to matter, you two never seem to learn who’s boss—”

  “—it won’t happen again, I promise—”

  “—you never understand unless it’s beaten into you. But I’m only human, the beatings can only go on so long, I’ve got to rest sometime. So the reminders stop, the bruises go away, and you’re back to your old ways again. It’s like lecturing the deaf with you two cunts, isn’t it?”

  “No, Daddy, I—”

  “Fuck it, girl, that’s enough,” he said, advancing on her, swinging the towel over his head like a bolas, taking vicious swipes out of the warm night air. “That’s all you two are, isn’t it? Just a couple of smelly cunts.”

  “Please don’t say that, Daddy.”

  “Empty in your belly, empty in your head.” The towel swooped closer. “Always up to the daddy to put obedience into that empty head, beat it into you, slap it into you until my hand hurts. And then it dribbles out and I have to do it all over again.” Swoop. The towel grabbed at her silken nightgown, took quick fists of fabric across her chest just above the nubs of her budding breasts and up toward her right shoulder. Swoop. A whap to her chin, mad white fists moving to her face. They looked like fan blades up close, no protective grid and no further to back away. She tried to ward them off but there was too much fury in them.

  “Keep your hands down!” he said.

  He climbed onto the bed, climbed onto her, hunkering down around her thighs. Her nightgown had ridden up and she felt the tickle and drift of his bathrobe on her skin, then the hot crush of his body. His knees pinned her legs together. Although he towered above her, she could barely see him through the squint of her eyes. Swoop. Eagle wings beat maniacally against her cheek, again and again and again, not soft with feathers but hard with bone like Granny Eva’s fold-up Oriental fan, that opened and closed with a shuk sound when you got just the right snap in your wrist. She heard herself crying, felt her daddy’s weight bouncing on her in time to the swooping of the towel, felt the towel take big stinging bites out of her left cheek.

  Then suddenly he was off her and the towel struck her in ghostly throbbings only, but she was afraid at first to do more than squint. Her sobs kept on beyond her control. Sound was all distorted. He might have yelled at her to shut the fuck up, but she couldn’t tell whether that was merely the memory of other times or whether he was really yelling it now. His hands vised her arms, lifting her off the bed, as though he were squeezing toothpaste tubes to make them burst. He let her go and she fell to the floor, hitting the worn throw rug with one bony hip. She heard the sharp snap of the towel, saw it drift down flat upon the bed. The hair on her daddy’s chest swirled out like a black mat where his exertions had wrenched open his robe.

  “Spanking time,” he growled, grabbing her again. She felt out of control in his hands, as if he might hurl her at any moment against the blinds and out past the jagged glass of her bedroom window or drive her straight into the floor. Instead he threw her, face down, on the bed, her body bouncing once with the force he used, and ordered her to hike up her nightgown. She obeyed, her hands compliant from long practice, although it had only been in the past year that he’d had her bare her bottom and only weeks ago that he’d given her the shimmering peach nightgown she had grown to hate so, tossing it in her face and demanding she wear it during her punishments instead of the long toasty flannel one she’d been given at her eighth birthday party and grown out of and fond of.

  At first Daddy’s open hand fell loud and hard on her upraised buttocks, driving her wet face into the pillow and making her bottom sting. “This will teach you,” he said over and over. She glanced back once but it was hard to make things out in the dim light. Her daddy was red-faced and the palm of his hand was red from swatting her. His robe hung all the way open now, and there was a tiny red arm with a red fist on the end of it coming out from under a mound of black body hair, and that arm was shaking stiffly, tremors of anger timed to his hand’s wide arc and shudder. She looked away, fixing on her new rose. It was stiff too but its color was not the red of anger but the pink of love, a soft bright comforting pink like the pink of Granny Eva’s cheeks under the greenhouse lights.

  Then his hand fell with less force, its arcs abruptly shorter, falling at last to nothing until it rested there. “This will teach you,” he kept saying, only now his words were quieter and had a tone to them that scared her worse than ever. His hands started to move, to probe, to pry her legs apart.

  “Don’t, Daddy,” she said, scarcely able to get the words out. He ignored her, didn’t tell her to shut up, kept probing, kept moving his fingers deeper inside her. “Daddy, please stop it, you’re hurting me.”

  There was a gasp from him that made her look back up at him. There we
re tears in his eyes. He saw her glance toward him. “Don’t look at me!” he shouted, and she fixed again on her rose, trying to shut out the pain. There was gravel in his voice. His hands came out of her, then she felt the mattress give as he climbed up behind her, felt his strong hands grip her thighs and pull them apart, felt him press something large and warm and terrible into her, something that kept moving deeper inside, tight and hard and hurtful. She squirmed against it but he clamped her thighs tight in his hands and pressed inward, crying now audibly.

  Karin’s jaw strained open. She put a thumb knuckle in her mouth, bit down. This was worse than anything that had come before, worse than the beatings and black eyes, worse than the spankings, worse even than hearing him tear her down with his words. She fixed on the rose, the tight pink beauty of it. In it, she saw her Granny’s face, the love that shown there always. The thorns, tiny but sharp, vied for her attention when the general throb of hurt he was visiting on her bristled with pain. But she kept to the bloom, saw her Granny there, heard her words. Keep a private place, that’s what she’d said. But if her daddy could do this to her, there were no private places left. She felt that shared space she had with Granny die inside her, saw Granny’s face become her mother’s face. The glow of the rose dimmed, but she could still see Mommy there. They had consoled one another before, sobbed in each other’s arms, gently stroking one another’s bruises; she saw her mother’s tired face in the flower and tried to throw her mind forward to the comfort her mother would provide when her torments were over.

  Then came one last awful thrust and her daddy stifled a huge sob, but she could hear that sob in the confines of her room and it seemed to go on and on. The pressure left off, but it was like the whirling towel had been before, still there, still throbbing, though gone. She lowered herself to the bed. The towel’s coarse cotton was cold and grainy on her belly and thighs.