Deadliest of Sins

by Sallie Bissell

  “No,” he said, trying to put the brakes on his rising panic. “She’s the governor’s cop. They wouldn’t mess with anybody like her.” But what if they weren’t afraid of the governor? They sure hadn’t been afraid of Gudger.

  He turned away from the window and hurried to his bedroom. He had to get to a phone and warn Mary Crow. If he ran through the back yard and along the creek, maybe he could persuade Mrs. Carver to let him use her telephone. Gudger was the one she hated, not him. He pulled on jeans, his sneakers, a long-sleeved shirt. Stuffing Sam’s little change purse in his back pocket, he was heading for a final pit stop in the bathroom when he heard footsteps on the front porch. He froze. Was Gudger back? Or had the gorilla in that black car now returned for him?

  His knees quivering, he stood in silence. He heard the squeak of the screen door, the door knob jiggling. He held his breath as the front door opened, praying to hear his mother call his name or even Gudger bellowing out Shithead. But he heard only silence, as if someone were just standing inside the door. His stomach clenched. Maybe it was the gorilla; maybe he was out there sniffing the air, trying to smell where he was. For an instant he considered diving under his bed and hiding, but that was crazy. The gorilla would find him in a heartbeat and probably be mad at having to look for him. Better just sneak out the back door, he decided. And run like hell to Mrs. Carver’s house.

  Trembling, he held on to the doorjamb and peeked around the corner. Down the hall he could see a man in a gray sweatshirt and khaki pants, leaning against the front door, head down, holding one hand under his armpit. A wave of relief washed over him. It was Gudger. Still alive, still in one piece.

  Yet something wasn’t right. Gudger usually roared into the house, slamming doors, calling names, hurling curses. That he was standing in silence with his head bowed could not be good. Walking on tiptoes, Chase inched down the hall to get a closer look.

  Gudger looked like a department store dummy. His bald spot was the color of pale wax and the three long locks that comprised his combover hung limply behind his ears. As Chase watched, Gudger pulled the door shut and locked it. As he withdrew his right hand from under his arm, Chase fought back a gasp. Gudger’s hand looked as if it had been cooked in a microwave. The skin was red to the point of blistering, his fingers were swollen like sausages. Gudger gazed at his disfigured self for a long moment, then he started to cry.

  Chase gulped, his terror now a living thing. Gudger in good health was bad enough—he couldn’t imagine what Gudger might do wounded and in pain. He eased back into the shadows of the hall. If he could get back to his room and push his dresser in front of the door, he could barricade himself in there until his mother got home. That way, he would at least be safe for a little while. Turning, he started to tiptoe back down the hall. He hadn’t taken three steps when he felt something grab the back of his neck. Gudger whipped him around with his good hand, slamming him against the wall. Wasps started buzzing inside Chase’s head.

  “You little smart-assed bastard,” Gudger whispered, his face dark with rage. “Did you actually think you could mess with me?”

  Chase tried to shake his head, but Gudger was gripping him too tightly.

  Gudger held up his ruined hand. “You know what this is? This is what happens when little boys go poking their noses into business that doesn’t concern them.”

  “Wh-what happened?” Chase asked, unable to take his eyes off Gudger’s raw-looking flesh.

  “Two Russian bastards thought it would be fun to hold my hand down in a tub of battery acid,” said Gudger. “They had a great time, too. Me, not so much.”

  Chase kept staring at the scalded fingers, his heart racing. He was too scared to think, to speak.

  “But don’t you worry, Olive Oyl,” Gudger growled. “I’ve still got one hand that works just fine. And that’s more than enough to take care of you.”

  He shoved Chase into his bedroom. “Here are two things you can think about for a while,” he said, as he pulled a door key from his pocket. “The first is that your pal Mary Crow won’t be stopping by here ever again. The second is that real bad things happen to little boys who fuck with me.”

  Twenty-Two

  Her name was Alice; she was from South Carolina. She was more cute than pretty—brown eyes, blond hair, freckles across her nose. Sam could tell by the way she talked that she would have been one of the popular girls at Sam’s school—a cheerleader, or a band majorette. Now, as they both lay beneath their bathroom sinks, whispering to each other through a hole in the wall, the cheerleader looked like a little rat in a cage, just as terrified as Sam. She’d been here for two months.

  “How do you know that for sure?” asked Sam. “There aren’t any clocks, and I can’t get anything but Spanish channels on the TV.”

  “I’ve gone through two boxes of Kotex,” Alice replied. She gave a sardonic laugh. “Yusuf gets real excited when he finds dirty pads in my trash. It’s like he’s relieved I haven’t gotten pregnant on his watch. Like I could in this room, all by myself.”

  “I haven’t had a period since I’ve been here,” said Sam.

  “Well, you’d better have one soon,” Alice warned. “If you don’t, they’ll call a doctor.”

  “That gross old man?” Sam shuddered at the memory of her last pelvic exam—the man’s dirty lab coat and rimless glasses, and the way he’d stripped off her clothes while those other men watched.

  “No, not the Meat Inspector,” said Alice. “If you start bleeding, or if you never bleed, they call in somebody else. A woman doctor who looks and sounds like a man.”

  “How do you know?” asked Sam, rubbing her arms against a sudden chill.

  “Because they called that doctor in for Michaela. She was in that room before you came.” Alice closed her eyes. “I listened to the whole thing through this pipe. It was horrible …”

  “What happened?”

  “Michaela did something to herself, you know, to make herself not a virgin anymore. She started bleeding, really bad.”

  “Did the doctor take care of her?” asked Sam.

  “I don’t think so. Everybody—Yusuf, the doctor, that guy Boyko—they were all in the room. Michaela was crying, screaming that she didn’t want to die. It was so scary I had to put the sink back together and go to bed. I put my pillow over my head and cried. The next morning, Michaela was gone.”

  “When did all this happen?” asked Sam.

  “Two weeks ago. I didn’t think they were going to put anybody back in that room, then you came along.”

  Sam sank back on the floor. She could still see the words this place is a hell hole scratched on the wall in front of the toilet. She pictured Michaela scratching those words into the wall, then plunging the same implement into her vagina. The image made her sick inside.

  “You know what’s funny?” whispered Alice. “Not funny ha-ha, but funny peculiar?”

  “No.” Sam rose up on her elbows. Through the hole she could see half of her new friend’s face. “What?”

  “Bobby—that’s my boyfriend—Bobby and I were going to do it the night they grabbed me.”

  “Do what?”

  “Have sex. End my virginity. We crashed a frat party at Clemson. I was a little nervous, since it was my first time, so Bobby thought I’d be more relaxed if I had a drink or two. There were some guys sitting around a picnic table in the back yard of the Chi Nu house. I didn’t think they looked like frat guys, but Bobby said they were okay. They’d mixed up a big bowl of Purple Jesus and gave us a couple. I took a sip and it was really good. Bobby and I both got pretty relaxed,” she whispered. “So we went back to Bobby’s car. We were in the backseat, kissing, about to take off our clothes when I got so sleepy I couldn’t keep my eyes open. When I woke up, I was here.”

  “What happened to Bobby?” asked Sam.

  “I don’t know. They won’t tell me.”
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br />   “I thought somebody had left a baby by the side of the road,” whispered Sam. “I went to see, and somebody grabbed me from behind.”

  “They got Michaela that way, too,” said Alice. “Somehow they figure out the ones they want to take.”

  Sam shifted on the cold tile floor. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Somewhere near an interstate. There’s a place where the boards don’t meet, up high in my window. If I stand on my tiptoes, I can watch them take the lot lizards out every night.”

  “The lot lizards?”

  “You know … the girls who have to work the truck stops.”

  Sam knew exactly who she was talking about—the girls who’d trudged down the other hall every night and come back every morning.

  “Those girls get twenty bucks for ten minutes in the back of a cab,” said Alice. “And they have to do whatever the driver wants. If they don’t, they get punished.”

  Sam thought about the parade that had passed by her door—the black girls who’d made fun of the white men, Dusty’s loud boasting about how much money she could make in a night. She’d thought it awful back then; now she thought those girls were lucky. At least they had each other. At least they got to go outside and breathe fresh air. At least they got to stay where everybody spoke English and could pronounce your name. “You know,” she whispered to Alice, trying not to cry. “I used to feel sorry for those girls. Now I think they’re lucky.”

  Alice wiped away her own tears. “I do, too.”

  They were silent for a moment, then Sam spoke. “Do you know what’s going to happen to us?”

  “Is Yusuf bringing you weird food? Like olives and goat cheese?”

  “He is.”

  “Then you’re going overseas, just like me.”

  Sam couldn’t believe what she’d heard. Though Ivan had told her virtually the same thing, she thought it was one of his crazy exaggerations, like how he said Moscow was the most beautiful city in the world, and all Russian men were hung like horses. She’d thought they might shuffle her off somewhere, but overseas? To some country she’s never heard of? She’d never see her mother again!

  “They’re going to sell us,” Alice went on. “To rich men who hate America.”

  “But why?” cried Sam, her heart beating a thousand miles an hour. “If they hate America, why would they want an American girl?”

  “Because getting one of us is like giving America the finger. They get to be even badder asses in their own country.”

  “How do you know this?”

  A hard look came in her pretty brown eyes. “There are ways of finding stuff out here.”

  “Yusuf?” asked Sam, remembering the way the man’s gaze roved over her body.

  Alice’s lower lip began to quiver. “He kept asking me to suck him off. For a long time I refused, then I decided it might be a way to get some information.” She wiped a tear from the corner of one eye. “I’ve probably done that guy off fifty times. The info comes right out with the kum.”

  “Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

  Alice gave a loud sniff. “I’d like to think he’s lying, but something tells me he’s not.”

  For a while neither of them spoke, lost in the looming terror of their futures, drawn closer with every drip of the faucet in Alice’s sink. Then, suddenly, the pretty blond cheerleader stuck one nail-bitten finger through the hole in the wall.

  “Touch me,” she whispered.

  Sam reached out, twined her finger around Alice’s.

  “You know before,” said Alice, “I hated my mother. Hated the way she dressed, hated the perfume she dabbed behind her ears, hated her stupid little checklist of things that would help me get into college. Keep my grades up, take charge of the cheerleaders’ service project, try out for the senior play.”

  Sam fought back an ironic smile. Though her mother’s checklist had not included cheerleading projects or senior plays, she’d had an agenda for Sam as well. Don’t talk to those men in the duplex. Stop Chase from calling the cops. And later, Don’t get on Gudger’s nerves.

  “Now,” Alice continued, “I would give anything to see my mom in her stupid jeans or get a whiff of her Obsession. Just for a minute, you know? Just to tell her that I love her.”

  “I know what you mean.” Sam squeezed Alice’s finger.

  For a moment they remained silent, touching. Then suddenly, Alice jerked her finger back through the hole. “Quick! Put your sink back together! Yusuf’s coming. Don’t drink the tea if you want to keep your head on straight. That’s where he puts the drugs!”

  Before Sam could say another word, the little hole between their shared wall shut. She heard a door open, then Yusuf said, “Why you down there? You sick?”

  “Yeah,” Alice replied, her voice now muffled. “I’m real sick.”

  Sam heard footsteps, movement in Alice’s bathroom. She knew she’d better reseal her part of the hole fast. She crouched beneath the sink and tried to screw the flange back in place with her home-made bra-hook screwdriver. But her fingers were shaking so that the little hooks continued to slip out of the proper slots. Clumsily, she dropped one screw. She tried to catch it as it bounced across the old tile floor but instead managed to knock the flange to the bottom of the U-trap. It made a loud ping that sounded like a bell ringing. She held her breath as Alice’s bathroom grew ominously quiet.

  Don’t let him look under the sink, she prayed, not daring to move for fear of making more noise. She sat there, holding her breath, listening to the pounding of her own heart, then all at once, Alice’s flange fell away. The little hole reopened, only this time not a pretty young face peered through it, but an olive-skinned man whose thick brows made a dark, angry V above his nose.

  “You two have been talking!” he cried, incredulous.

  Sam didn’t know what to say—to deny it seemed bad, but to admit the truth seemed worse. She settled on staying mute, hoping that Alice would know what to do.

  “You little bitches!” Yusuf thundered. “You little whores!”

  “We are not!” cried Alice, starting to slap Yusuf on his head and shoulders. “We just want to go home!”

  Yusuf gave Sam a final, furious glare, then he turned away from the drain pipe, slamming Alice’s flange shut. Sam knew it would never be opened again—they would close it with nails, plaster it over before they would let her talk with Alice again. Still, she put her ear to the wall and tried to hear what was going on next door. She heard Yusuf’s yelling in Turkish, Alice crying, then the sound of glass breaking. After that, she heard nothing but silence.

  She waited, crouched on the bathroom floor, for what seemed like hours, hoping to hear something from Alice’s room. When she didn’t, she kissed the finger she’d intertwined with Alice’s. For a few minutes, she’d had a friend—a pretty girl who’d spoken English with a Southern accent and who, like her, had never had sex. If everything Alice had told her was true, they would soon be sold to people who would treat them like slaves. After that, who knew? After that, who cared? She patted the old tile wall softly, as if that might give comfort to her friend next door. She knew she would never see Alice again. She also knew that the next time she saw Yusuf’s face, he would likely be coming for her.

  Twenty-Three

  Mary left Eddie Wallace’s house/stock car garage quickly, eager to get away from the self-pitying homophobia of clan Wallace. She took a circuitous route to Angelo’s restaurant, driving along roads that bisected corn fields, enjoying the warm summer wind that whipped through her hair. As she drove, she composed her report to Ann Chandler.

  “The demographic of Campbell County is largely Christian and extremely conservative,” she said. “The majority of those Christians believe that being gay is not only a choice, but a sin that will send a homosexual person to hell.”

  Here she stopped, unsure of her conclus
ion. Unless Galloway had come up with some new bit of incriminating evidence, she’d found nothing at Trull’s church to indicate that his parishioners wanted to do anything beyond turn gay people straight and save their souls. Though Trull’s sermons were fiery and hugely offensive, the man had not advocated violence to anyone, beyond parents spanking their children. Nonetheless, two gay men had been murdered within ten miles of each other. Somebody either living in or passing through Campbell County had a hatred of gays that ran deep and occasionally lethal.

  “If I were the governor, I’d just offer Ecotron a sweet deal in a more progressive county,” she said. “Any gay person who moves here will have to keep looking over their shoulder, 24/7.”

  She sighed. She knew that wouldn’t be what Ann Chandler wanted to hear, but she couldn’t help it. In Campbell County, homophobia was an acceptable, Bible-endorsed prejudice. There was little the governor could do to change that. Certainly not with people like Reverend Trull in the pulpit.

  As the western sky grew pink with the setting sun, she headed toward Angelo’s. She pulled into a moderately full parking lot and walked into a restaurant decorated in an old-fashioned way, with red-checked tablecloths and candles stuck in empty Chianti bottles. Galloway lifted a half-filled wine glass at her from a small table in one corner, tucked in beneath a big poster of Venetian gondoliers.

  “I was beginning to think you’d stood me up,” he said as he rose from his chair.

  Mary smiled. “I took a little detour on my tour of the county.”

  She sat down. Immediately, a little old man in a black tuxedo jacket appeared with a basket of warm bread and two menus.

  “This joint’s a real trip, isn’t it?” Galloway filled her wine glass from his bottle of Valpolicella.

  “I haven’t seen candles in Chianti bottles in years,” Mary admitted. “Or formally dressed waiters.”

  “Angelo is definitely old-school Italian. If the food weren’t so good, I’d think he was some wise guy, hiding out from the mob.”