“That’s it, then?”
“No, but other problems exist. If there was oral or anal sex you can charge the person with sodomy, but if the child consented and was thirteen—bad luck, that number—you can also charge the child. Or you can try for statutory rape because she’s under fifteen but with that there are tremendous evidentiary problems. When you said the kid had been making porn flicks that just adds problems. Any aspect of the child’s sexual history is admissible if it provides an alternative explanation for physical evidence of sex. You haven’t got a lot to work with. She’s of the age where coercion needs to be shown and you haven’t any visible scars to show. Her own behavior contaminates the physical evidence that her father had sex with her. I’m sure there are no witnesses to these sexual encounters. It boils down to pitting the kid against her father and let me tell you if the father plays hardball that can be an incredibly ugly business. ‘Would you care to tell the jury, Snow White, just how it felt when you were sucking your daddy’s cock? Did you like it?’ I wouldn’t want to put a kid through that, knowing the uncertainty of justice in the courts without a signed confession and eight-by-ten-inch glossies of him with a gun at her head.”
I had no problem at all imagining Mr. Benson in the scenarios Walt had described. “Excuse me, professor, but exactly what did happen to justice?”
“Justice,” he scoffed, “nobody wants justice, Leo. Victims want vengeance, villains want mercy. Justice lies somewhere between and it’s of interest only to the state, not the participants. Don’t expect it to be anything else or you’ll be mighty disappointed.”
“Christ on a crutch! Who needs the law!” I snapped.
“We need it, Leo, my boy. Our law is primarily designed to protect us from the state as a threat, not from each other. The significance of that fact seems lost on our native white citizenry. Try to imagine the whole fucking state as the enemy, not some isolated wazoos—now that’s a nightmare. Leo, do what I suggest: walk away from it. Class dismissed.”
“Thanks, Walt. Send me a bill.”
“Fuck you too, friend.”
I put the phone down. Randi was in the doorway. She had on a pair of my long khaki slacks rolled up like pedal pushers and my T-shirt pulled up on her waist and knotted in front. “The shorts were too big so I put these on ’cause they had a belt. Is that okay?”
“Sure.” What am I going to do with this kid? We’ll go one step at a time, I thought. I can’t send her home and the law’s as much a harm as help.
She’d washed her hair and wrapped it in a towel. Her face was clean but she looked worn and tired.
Let’s start with something basic. “Would you like something to eat? I’m not much of a cook but it won’t kill you and it’ll stick to your ribs.”
“Yeah. I’m starving.” She sat down at the table, eyeing me from a distance. We were proceeding with caution.
I went to the refrigerator and squatted before it, surveying the leftovers and never-beens, creating combinations in my mind and then discarding them. I opted for basic peasant. I took out three potatoes and a package of ground beef. I went to the sink and began to wash the potatoes. I looked over my shoulder at Randi still staring at my back.
“Would you please set the table? The plates are there above the dishwasher. The silverware’s here by the sink and the glasses up there.” I waved around the room, pointing to closed drawers like a circus barker telling of unseen wonders.
Randi sat the obligatory long count before she pushed off from the table to begin to set it. I went back to the potatoes. I finished washing them, and got the Cuisinart out, put in the shredder and pushed them down the feed tube. I put them to one side.
“Where are the napkins?” Her voice startled me.
“Oh, in the pantry over there.” I pointed and she pursued.
I set up two skillets, turned on the gas and melted the butter in each one. In one I placed the shredded potatoes. I took the meat out and made two hamburgers, gently wrapping the meat around an ice cube. I turned up the heat and put them into the pan.
“We’ll be ready to eat soon. What do you want to drink?”
No reply. I turned. Randi was staring out across the lawn. Some kids were walking down the street. School was out and the bus had just dropped them off. They walked in close groups, some of both boys and girls, some not, the groups talking animatedly with an endless tossing of hair and book-clutching giggling. The stragglers walked alone and were silent. I looked from the kids to Randi and back. What she saw and felt I didn’t know.
She put her head down on the table and made a terrible noise. It began low and broke into a wail, a windstorm of sorrow rushing up out of some place long ago locked off inside her. The sound peaked and then fell away to racking sobs. She held her stomach and rocked. The food burned and smoked. I turned it off. I wanted to stroke her, to hold her and console her, to lie to her. I didn’t want her to be afraid anymore, to hurt anymore, to be afraid of me. I looked at my hands, thick, square, useless.
I couldn’t stand that sound. I had to stop it. I sat down next to her and gingerly put an arm around her shoulder. She was so far down into herself she didn’t even know I was there. I held her tighter, an island in the storm, a way back. She leaned against me and I began to rock with her, back and forth, the oldest comfort there is. Rhythmic warmth surrounding you, the first consolation for being born. Small, cold and alone, your heart beating wildly you slowly attune to the mother’s rhythm, her enfolding calm. Slowly the sobs began to slow down in harmony with our rocking and we rocked more slowly. I undid a piece of the towel on her head and brushed her tears. She took it from me, unwound it from her head and rubbed her face, trying to erase the tears as she would a stain on a stone. Tears are a poor salve but they’re all we’ve got.
I sat back and looked at her. She met my eyes clearly and directly. Defiance and entreaty swirled in her face. Now or never.
“For me to help you I need to know something about what’s happened to you. Will you talk about it?”
She nodded yes.
“What happened with your father?”
She bit her lower lip, looked down at the table across all the years of her life and with a deep sigh let her secret go like a black bird. “When I was little he would come to my room when I was in bed and tuck me in and give me a kiss good night. Well, he started to touch me and asked me to touch him and I did. He told me it was our secret and not to tell Mommy. She’d be angry. I was afraid but I felt special and he let me do all kinds of things so I felt he loved me. He told me how pretty I was all the time. That’s all I wanted was for him to love me.” She paused at hearing what she’d said. “Anyway, one day I asked him for a puppy and he said yes, I could have a puppy. My friend Jennifer’s dog had had a bunch. They were so cute. So I got the dog. I named it Brandy. You know Randi and Brandy. Only I had to be nice to him. He wanted me to, you know, put it in my mouth.” The memory passed through her and she shuddered. “It was terrible and I wanted to stop but he got very angry and said he’d put Brandy to sleep. I was so afraid that I just let him do what he wanted.”
“What about your mother—did you tell her?”
“I tried once. I told her I didn’t like him tucking me in at night. I made up something like I didn’t like the way his beard felt when he kissed me good night. She just got angry and told me he was my father and I should respect and listen to him and be thankful that he cared enough to tuck me in at night. Lots of girls never got that from their fathers.” She stopped to catch her breath. She looked like she was running from her own words.
“So it went on like that. I would just lay there and let him do it when he wanted to. If I said I didn’t want to he’d get so angry he frightened me and I was too afraid to run away then. Anyway, pretty soon he wanted to, you know, do it all and I said no more. He did it once and it really hurt. I lay in bed as long as I could but then I went to the bathroom. It hurt so bad I wanted to see what had happened to me. I sat on the toilet. I was blee
ding and I didn’t know how to stop it. I was shaking and started to cry for my mother. Anyhow, she came in and saw me holding myself and bleeding and said that there was nothing to be upset about. It was normal and it meant that now I was a woman. She gave me some Tampax to put in myself and said we’d talk about it in the morning. I thought I was going crazy that night. That somehow this was normal and she knew all about it and it was okay.”
She licked her lips and asked for something to drink. I offered milk or juice. She wanted a beer. We agreed on ice water.
“I walked around school in a daze. I couldn’t believe that was how you got to be a woman. I tried to imagine Jennifer’s father doing it to her or my other friends. Anyway, one day I decided to ask Jennifer if her father had made her a woman yet and she looked at me like I was a Martian or something. She said that was a disgusting idea and where’d I come up with such a creepy thought. God, I felt so stupid and so alone.”
“This was after you stopped seeing your friends at school?”
“Yeah, I was so weird and different, you know, but I couldn’t tell anyone. So I just spent more time by myself.”
“Why did you decide to run away?”
“I told my father I didn’t want to do it anymore and he really surprised me. He didn’t get angry or anything, just told me not to tell my mother and we’d just forget all about it. I said fine, I didn’t care about anything but that it was over. Anyway, I found out about why he let it end so easily.” She shook her head and the tears began to well up in her eyes. She squinted to shut out the pain that twisted her face into a grimace. The sobs began to jerk her up and down: a puppet pulled by strings attached at cruel places. Her words came through the tears anyway. “I saw him coming out of Tammy’s room one night just like he used to do with me. I was so scared. I ran in there and talked to her. It was just like with me—first the touching. I was so angry I wanted to kill him, so the next day after he went to work I came back from the bus stop and told my mother what had happened. Boy, what a mistake. She went crazy, called me a whore and a slut and how could I be so evil as to say that about my father and what kind of woman did I think she was and I was sick and needed help and she was going to call a psychiatrist for me. I just freaked out completely and ran out of the house and got a ride to the mall. I was hoping Angie would go there after school to hang out. I was so mixed up.”
“How’d you get mixed up with Tony Julian?”
“He was cute and said he, you know, liked me a lot and anyway he had his own car and place, and I was really afraid. I had no place to go. I had nothing, no money. So I went with him. He was nice to me, he gave me some money and got me something to eat and talked to me. He seemed real interested, you know, said he wanted to help.” I hoped the parallels weren’t lost on her. “So I stayed with him. He was nice and let me do anything I wanted. I slept late the next day and we just bummed around, you know, bought some records I liked and some clothes, I didn’t have any. We ate out. He just seemed to like me and let me, you know, be myself. He had lots of dope and we got high and that made me feel better. I’d never done that before. Boy, was I missing something. I didn’t feel so alone or so scared anymore. I thought about going to school and my friends but I just felt so weird around them, not around Tony, so I didn’t go back to school. We just hung out and had a good time.”
“How’d you get involved with Dixon and that scene?”
She shook her head in dismay but not disbelief. “That night we were back at his place and we’d gotten high again and he came over to me and wanted to fuck me and I could see it happening all over again. All I could think about was what my mother had said to me—I was a whore, a slut. So I said, if I’m a whore, be a whore—who cares anyway? It didn’t surprise me that that’s what he wanted and he treated me okay, so why not? What’s the big deal? I was pretty high. That made it better, you know, like doing it but not really. Like it’s not you that’s doing it. So I just lay there. At least it didn’t hurt and he was done pretty fast. I just decided it wasn’t that terrible and he seemed to treat me okay, you know, let me do what I wanted, and made me feel good sometimes so why not, at least he wasn’t my father, you know. I didn’t feel so great the next day, you know, kinda crappy like I was bad and that’s why this was happening to me. I kept trying to remember Jennifer and thought about talking to her but I knew I was getting weirder every day. So I just got high and it all went away. Sometimes I’d feel so bad I wanted to die. Like I was never gonna be okay again and then other times I’d just say to hell with it, you know, fuck it.” She eyed me to see my reaction to her story. I don’t know what she saw. She went on. “Who cares? So when they wanted to take pictures of me and Tony doing it I didn’t care. After you’ve done it with dad, what’s left? Right?”
Of all the things she lost, her sense of horror might have been the most important. Without it there’s no way to say no.
“So I did it, I got high. It was kind of a gas, you know, being bad like that. Everybody got off on it, you know what a super chick I was to do it and how sexy and I could be a star and I turned everyone on. I felt like sending one to my father to blow his mind. It felt good, you know, everybody said I was awesome, you know special.”
“Do you want to go back to that?”
She fixed me with a stare as if I were the Martian now. “What else is there? It’s what I seem to wind up in.” She stopped and thought about it for a while. “No, not really. Tony was just like my dad. Always angry if I didn’t want to do what he said. You know what I’d really like to do? Make so much money I’d never have to do anything anybody tells me, just be by myself.”
I thought about what had happened to her and what she wanted for herself. I wondered if there was any way to get there from here. A plan began to take form. It was far from perfect but it seemed like the least awful alternative.
“Let me tell you what we can do.” She looked straight at me and pulled her legs up under her. Sitting on her feet, she began to nibble her thumb nail. A child’s posture, dependent, yet strangely provocative in her. She seemed to exude an aura of passivity and compliance that was intoxicating. She’d better learn to protect herself. She was a walking invitation to abuse. Take care of me, be kind to me, and I’ll let you do anything. The world did not lack for men who would embellish her invitation with rococo designs of their own. If your father will what else should you expect?
“I can try to get you a second chance to be a kid. I can’t undo what happened to you. What I can do is clear a space for you to take a look at yourself, who you want to be. The world isn’t just your father and Tony Julian. There’re people out there who can love you and take care of you. The world is also full of people who will use you and ball you up and throw you away when they’re done. But only if you let them. If you don’t want that then maybe I can help you make a start.”
She looked very carefully at me, directly into my eyes, impressing her need into me. Searching to see if I could be trusted. Would I avert my eyes? Acknowledging the failure to be what she needs. I let her eyes roam through my skull. “All right. What do I have to do?”
“Do you want to live at home anymore?”
“No way.”
“Okay, then this is the deal. You go to a boarding school until you’re eighteen. You get into therapy.”
“Why?” she whined.
“Because this whole bag of shit has got to have affected you. Look at what you agreed to do to yourself with Tony. You need protection from yourself right now. To sort out what you’ve learned from all this and that takes somebody to do it with. That’s why.”
She looked sullenly at me as if I’d promised her a car and she found out it had no engine.
“Your dad will pay for the therapy, the school and all it costs, your clothes and that’s it. No presents. No treats. No gifts. No bribes to come home. No little surprises because you’ve been so good. You want to have a good time, you pay your own way. You get a job in the summers.”
“Why? H
e’s got lots of money. He oughta owe me something for what he did.”
“He does. He owes you plenty but none of it costs a cent. You can’t take a bill for your pain to him and collect for it. He owes you, nobody else does. If he won’t try to right things with you nobody else has to or can. What you’ve been through doesn’t exempt you from future shit or entitle you to special treatment. If you survive your past, you get a future just like everyone else.”
I sat back. “That’s my offer. You stay in school until you’re eighteen and in therapy until your therapist says you’re done and your father picks up the tab. At eighteen you can do what you want. You understand?”
She nodded.
“Maybe someday you’ll get to feel like those kids you saw on the street.”
I thought that if I could wrap her in the trappings of childhood, school, friends, dances, homework, rules, an orderly flow of growing up with someone to help her sort herself out she might yet feel okay about herself and not so alone or bad. Who knows?
“I still don’t know what I have to do.”
“Yeah. Here comes the hard part.” I told her what she needed to do to effect her escape. She chewed her thumb throughout. I thought of foxes’ gnawed limbs left in spring traps and wondered how much of herself she’d have to leave behind to get free and whether it was any improvement on the law.
She sat and stared at me from a long way away, appraising me, cataloging me with a direct calm I hadn’t seen before. I felt uncomfortable. The order of things was subtly shifting. I wasn’t in charge here, setting down terms, getting my way. Yeah, getting my way. C’mon, kid, play along in my movie. See, I ride this white horse. No, we don’t have to do that yucky stuff but we still do it my way. A master still. Benign, I hope, but just another master. Tough shit, the kid needed one right now.
All the Old Bargains Page 14
