Teddy (The Pit)

by John Gault

  “Fuck you,” he shouted back.

  “Don’t take it so hard, Davey,” one of them said. “Just think: what if you’d gone to Illinois?” This time, as best he could under the breathing conditions, he joined in the laughter. Then, very suddenly, nothing seemed very funny any more. He felt an overpowering hatred for this place. There was something—no, more than one thing—terribly wrong about it. Evil? No, it was just ugly. No, not evil. It was just because he’d been half-remembering all that stuff about the Whatelies. Nevertheless his skin was crawling, and he had the overwhelming need to be under a boiling hot shower, scrubbing himself, scrubbing off all this stinking, cloying filth. He forced himself to take one more look around. There had to be tunnels, two of them. He turned his eyes around again, no, three. Running off into the walls right at floor level.

  Reluctantly he crawled toward the nearest, playing the beam of his light around the circumference, estimating the opening to be eighteen-to-twenty-inches in diameter. He poked the flashlight in its own length, plus the length of his forearm, but the tunnel ended abruptly in what appeared to be a right-angle turn. He could see maybe eight or ten feet into the second tunnel, but it too curved—downward this time. For a reason that he could not explain, David did not want to peer down that third tunnel. It seemed to be no different from the other two, at least not in the size or shape of the opening, but David had the sensation of pushing his luck. For Christ’s sake, he told himself, you’re thirty years old and you’re a man and you’re a cop; you’re just being an asshole. The reproach didn’t help much, but he decided he had to do his duty as he saw it—especially with all those witnesses up there.

  “Unnhhh!”

  “What? What’s going on? Davey?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.” His heart was pumping and his throat felt full, constricted. “Nothing. Get me out of here.”

  On the surface once more, David avoided the curious eyes of the men surrounding him. “Didn’t fall in here,” he muttered. “I guess we’ll have to try the quarry.” Then he looked at his watch and at the fading, late-evening sun. “Tomorrow,” he said. “As many of you as can make it tomorrow, can you meet me out by the road where we came in this afternoon? Jerry, can you tow your boat along? I think we can carry it in between us.”

  The men began to drift away, some individually and others in groups of two and three. When they were all gone, David sat down on a hummock, unaware that it was the same hummock the Reverend Morley had plunked down on two days before to study the cedar waxwing, and looked toward the hole. God Jesus, it felt good to be out of there. He looked up to see Hank staring at him quizzically from the edge of the clearing. David managed what he hoped looked like a rueful smile and waved the young man away. He wanted to go home alone tonight and talk to nobody about the hole and the tunnels.

  Besides, he was no longer sure that he’d actually seen those terrible yellow eyes.

  When he was sure the policeman had gone, Jamie hand-over-handed himself down the rope and stood in the dying twilight, looking intently toward the hole. He had arrived unnoticed a couple of hours before and climbed up to his perch to watch. And listen. So Old Morley wasn’t down there? They hadn’t found anything down there. But the cop, when he came up, he was scared, wasn’t he? Even from that far away and with the light not so good, Jamie could tell that the cop had been scared. But he couldn’t have seen them, could he? Or he’d have shot them or something. Sure.

  Jamie smiled to himself and whistled a little tune that he’d either heard someplace or made up, he didn’t recall which. Oh yes, now he remembered; it was what old Morley had been humming just before he died. The sun was almost gone now, the woods dressed for the evening in shades of gray.

  “Good night,” he said into the hole. “I won’t be here for a couple of days. When all those men stop coming, then I’ll come back. Good night.”

  C H A P T E R

  5

  The Benjamins had arrived in Jericho in mid-August of 1979, August the 17th to be precise. And on August the 19th, at about ten thirty in the morning, Jamie had received his first beating. The boy’s name was Freddy Hoekstra, and although he was going into the same eighth grade as Jamie, he was a year and a half older, and his voice had already changed. He had real muscles and the fuzzy, but dark, beginnings of a moustache.

  Jamie had been sitting alone on one of three playground swings, whistling to himself, kicking just enough to maintain a four- or five-foot arc, when out of nowhere this man-boy was looming over him. What the hell did Jamie think he was doing, sitting on Freddy’s girlfriend’s swing, anyway? Jamie hadn’t answered back. Experience had taught him that sometimes when you don’t answer back, you don’t get hit.

  He’d glanced to his left to see the girl friend’s smirking face, with its washed-out blue eyes framed by a frizzle of blond hair, almost as blond as his own. He hadn’t wanted to look at the boy; sometimes when you looked at guys like that, especially if you looked them in the eye, they’d hit you. The girl had tits—little tits like half-lemons, but tits. He’d been looking at those tits when the blow came. It was a hard punch. It came out of nowhere and caught Jamie flush on the left side of his face. It lifted him out of the seat and sent him flying backwards onto the baked-hard dirt.

  Freddy had stood over him, fists clenched, a wicked sadistic smile on his face. “When I say move, shitface, I mean move!” Jamie had just looked at him blankly and pretended to clear his head. Sometimes that worked; if you made like you were hurt, really hurt, sometimes they didn’t hit you again. Jamie had stood up with his back to the man-boy, and dabbed at the blood that was trickling out of his left nostril. He’d waited for the punch to the back of his head, the one that would send him on his way, but it never came. Only a shove. “Go on,” Freddy had said, pushing him again, “Get out of here, shitface. Get your ass out of here. And if I ever catch you on my girlfriend’s swing again, I’ll really give it to you.” Jamie heard the girl giggle as he walked away. Jamie never returned to the playground again, and he never saw the girl or boy again until school started, which was also when he finally learned their names. Freddy and Christina. She even lived on Jamie’s street. On the third day of school, with about thirty kids watching, Freddy beat him up again, while the lemon-tits girl giggled.

  Jamie never said anything to anybody about it. He had learned years before that complaining never did any good, that nobody really cared anyway. Oh once, back in Glen’s Falls, the teacher had caught a bunch of boys beating him up and they were all given detentions for a month. After that everybody had left him alone for the rest of the school year, at least until the next-to-last day. He’d gone into the washroom and was peeing when all the lights went out. Something woolly and foul-tasting was shoved in his mouth, and he was wrestled to the floor by how many hands he didn’t know. He was blindfolded too, and he could feel his clothes being stripped off. Everything. In the darkness—he had never known whether or not the lights had been turned back on—he heard nasty, giggling laughter but no words, no identifiable voices. When he had realized, however many minutes later, that he was once more alone, he’d lifted the blindfold and spat out the sweat sock that had been his gag; his clothes had been distributed in the four urinals, piss-soaked, and his shoes in one stall, filled with feces.

  No, he never told on other kids—not even that time—and after a while they pretty much left him alone. And he never, ever fought back. And he never ever talked back. He didn’t cry and he didn’t beg and he didn’t threaten to get even. The truth was that Jamie, at least as far as he could tell, didn’t mind much any more. He knew his place, and he accepted it. As the years passed he couldn’t really remember what had happened in Georgia and what had happened in Canada. Faces blurred. Events blurred. Places blurred.

  And when they moved again, to Seattle, Freddy and Christina and Abergail and all of the rest of Jericho, Wisconsin, would blur too. Only six more days of school, then maybe, in Seattle, in high school, things would be better.

 
; “Hey, douchebag!” Jamie refused to look up. He knew it was Freddy Hoekstra, on the other side of the street, walking to school with Christina, whose tits were still like lemons. Jamie didn’t know what “douchebag” meant, but he assumed it was disgusting, like “shitface.” He kept walking, head down, pretending he hadn’t heard.

  “Hey, you! Douchebag! I’m talking to you!” Jamie heard Christina’s stupid giggling. “You got in shit again, eh? You brought that dirty book to school, you dumb dork. Too bad you got to do it with a book, too bad you haven’t got a girl . . .”

  “Oh, Freddy, don’t be gross!” She giggled some more.

  Only six more days, Jamie told himself. Deliberately he slowed his pace and didn’t pick it up again until he saw Freddy and Christina round the corner. He wished they were dead. Well, maybe not dead; badly wounded would do.

  On the sidewalk in front of him a bicycle lay on its side. Abergail’s bicycle. He looked up. Abergail’s house, Abergail’s and Miss Livingstone’s. He looked around. No Abergail. He looked around again, just to be sure. He reached down and lifted the bike onto its wheels, holding it up by the handlebars with his left hand so that he could inspect it. It was beautiful. All red and silvery chrome. French, he knew. A ten-speed. Expensive, hundreds of dollars. Much better than his own bike, but right now anything was better than his own bike. Tom and Barbara probably wouldn’t let him ride it again until they were in Seattle, if then. That frigging Miss Oliphant.

  Jamie stroked the gleaming metal, warm to the touch in the June morning sun, and then, dreamily, straddled it. The handlebar grips felt so good in his hands, and he closed his eyes for a moment or two, just letting the whole pleasure of the experience wash through him.

  Suddenly he sensed someone nearby, and in his scramble to get off and away, he let the bicycle topple heavily and noisily back onto the concrete of the sidewalk. His right foot got caught up in it somehow, and he sprawled, scraping skin off the heel of his left hand as he tried to block his fall.

  “If that bike is broken, you little creep, you’ll wish you’d never been born!” Abergail!

  Jamie scuttled away as the bike was angrily snatched up. The girl looked down her sunburned nose at him. More than Freddy, more than just about anybody, Abergail Buhl made him afraid. She was different from the other kids; not in the way that he was different, but different. He had never heard her laugh at anything that wasn’t, to his mind, cruel. (Sometimes, when he was talking to Teddy, he’d call her “Cruel Buhl.”) She was laughing now. She had examined her bike and, having assured herself that it was undamaged, she just stood and laughed. It stung him as he crouched—no, cowered—there, half on the sidewalk, half on the grassy boulevard.

  “You’re lucky, funny person. You’re really lucky,” she sneered, wetting her finger and rubbing at some spot on the bicycle seat that Jamie hadn’t even seen. She set the bike down lightly and stood over him, her legs apart, as if daring him to even try to look up the short, pleated skirt she was wearing.

  Instead he scuttled a few feet farther away. But he still wondered if Teddy was right when they’d talked about Abergail, if she really did touch herself down there. The thought confused him, and he could feel his brain clouding up. He stood and, not bothering to brush himself, turned his back on her and walked away. After twenty or thirty steps he realized he was heading for home, not school, and even though she was still standing there, he turned, crossed the street and, head down, passed her.

  “Yeh, funny person, you stay over on that side of the street from now on,” she shouted at him. “Or I’ll tell my Aunt Margaret, and she’ll call your mother, and you’ll never get your bike back. And you know something else, creepy Jamie Benjamin? Some day they’re going to come for you, the men in the white coats, and they’re going to take you away and put you somewhere, somewhere with rubber walls. You know who says? I say. And Aunt Margaret says . . .”

  The farther away he got, the louder she shouted. He could feel people standing in doorways, watching him and listening to her. He could feel people coming around from their backyards. He wanted to put his hands over his ears, to block her out. What he really wanted to do was run back and grab her by that perfect red hair and smash her face into the sidewalk. The blood was pounding in his face, and his ears almost crackled under the heat of the blush. But he kept on walking.

  “Aunt Margaret knows, funny person. She knows. She knows it was you who sent the picture.”

  For the first time since he’d left the house that morning, Jamie felt himself smile. Teddy would be so happy when he told him.

  C H A P T E R

  6

  She was, Jamie believed, just about the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. And there she was, standing in his backyard, asking him if he was Jamie. He couldn’t even speak right away. He nodded instead.

  “Well,” she said, showing perfect white teeth, “I’m Sandy. Sandy O’Reilly. I’m going to be staying with you for a while—unless it isn’t okay with you, of course.”

  Okay? He was having trouble.

  She saw his discomfort and knelt down beside him on the grass. She smelled better than anything too. “Your mother hi . . . your mother asked me to stay with you for the next week or so while she and your father are in Seattle. They’re looking for a new home for you.” He didn’t like to be talked down to, not usually, anyway, but he didn’t let on to her. Her lips looked so soft, and she had such pretty eyes. Seattle? Oh yes, what they were talking about last night. Yes, they were moving to Seattle. He realized, with shame he’d never remembered feeling before, that he had a grasshopper in his right hand and a closed jar full of them on the ground beside his knee.

  “Bugs,” he mumbled. “For the toads and the snakes. My terrarium.” That felt stupid too. At that very moment he didn’t want to be young enough to have a terrarium and toads and snakes, and he especially didn’t want to be young enough to be grubbing around the backyard on his hands and knees. He put the last grasshopper in the jar and, leaving it on the ground, he stood. Sandy’s hand went out to help him up, but he pretended not to see it. He scrubbed his own bug-filthy hand against his jeans and, seeing that hers was still stretched out toward him, he tentatively reached for it. Oh, it was so soft and warm. And small, not much bigger than his own. Lovely warmth started in his belly and flowed all through him. “I’m Jamie,” he said finally, speaking softly.

  He didn’t know what to do next. His hand was still in hers, and he didn’t want that to end. It was like . . . holding hands. So that’s what it felt like, so that’s why other people, other kids, did it. It felt wonderful, not dirty or sexy or anything, but warm and comfortable. He looked away from the clasped hands, up into her face, to see if it was all right. She was still smiling, so it must be okay. What a beautiful smile.

  “Hello!” Barbara, damn her, was pushing out through the screen door, and Sandy was turning toward the voice. Jamie felt her hand slip away and her attention transfer. He stuck his hand deep into his pocket and began to check the grass for more bugs.

  “I’m Barbara Benjamin,” Barbara said, reaching out her own hand to Sandy. Sandy took it, but only briefly. Jamie was instantly happy that Sandy didn’t touch and hold hands that way with everybody, the way she did with him.

  “Hi. I’m Sandy O’Reilly. We spoke on the phone.”

  “I thought you might be. Won’t you come in? I have some coffee on.” The two women walked side by side toward the door, and Jamie began to follow. “No, Jamie,” his mother said, you stay out here for a little while. Sandy and I have some things to discuss.”

  Jamie tried not to look at Sandy; he didn’t want her to see what he knew must be showing in his face. But he couldn’t help it. And he knew, he just knew that she understood what he was feeling. Her eyes were saying, I’m sorry, Jamie; I wouldn’t treat you that way; I like you, Jamie.

  Then she smiled, and so did he. As the door started to close behind the two women Jamie saw Sandy’s hand wave conspiratorially at him, from behind h
er back so Barbara wouldn’t see. He smiled again and waved back.

  “I hope he doesn’t cause you any trouble, Sandy.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he won’t,” Sandy replied. What a strange way to open a conversation with someone you’ve just met, she thought. She didn’t like to go by first impressions, but what they told her in this case was that if there was trouble in the Benjamin household, it wasn’t all because of Jamie. Was the place always this tidy and clean? Did it always smell of lemon oil and forest glade kinds of air freshener? Were people allowed to actually sit at that dining room table?

  Sandy noticed the indentations her sneakers had made in the thick, off-white carpet, and she was actually asking herself if she should try to smooth them out while Barbara was in the kitchen getting the coffee. She was even apprehensive about actually rocking in the chair she had chosen—chosen solely because it was the only thing in the room that looked hospitable to the human bum. Mentally she added everything in that living room, especially the atmosphere, to her list of things that she would not have in her own future home.

  “I hope you’re right,” Barbara said, emerging from the kitchen with delicate bone-china cups, creamer, and sugar bowl on a silver ray. “But I think it’s only fair to warn you that Jamie is sometimes a . . . uh . . . difficult boy.”

  Does she want me to stay here or doesn’t she? What’s she trying to do? I met Jamie, and he’s no monster. He’s shy and polite. What does she mean by difficult? Should I ask? No, she’ll tell me and I’ll listen and then after Jamie and I are alone for a while I’ll make up my own mind. But I’d better say something.