Rape: A Love Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  (You’d have to be a local to know that this referred to St. Thomas Aquinas High School, on the north side of the city.)

  Momma said, in a voice like she was personally hurt, annoyed, “Somebody should clean this park up, it used to be so beautiful and now it’s just sad.”

  You said, brattish twelve-year-old needing to get the last word, “Momma, the city of Niagara Falls is sad. Where’ve you been?”

  Across a roadway, through a stand of pine trees, was Ninth Street.

  A five-minute walk home.

  Faces rushing at you. Grinning teeth, glittery eyes.

  Like a pack of dogs. So fast!

  Three of them ahead of you, driving you back.

  Teasing, laughing. Yipping.

  One of them is bare chested. Skinny chest, hairless. A smell of something sweetly acrid, burning.

  Straggly-haired, loud-laughing. Running beside you. More of them, younger kids. Clapping their hands hooting and jeering driving you and your mother back, toward the interior of the park. The boathouse.

  It’s happening too fast. Your eyes are open but blind.

  Telling yourself this isn’t happening, this will not happen.

  In another minute this will stop. This will go away.

  Momma is trying to talk to them. Smile at them. Joke. They seem to know her. Teeeeena! Touching her hair, grabbing at her hair. One of them, sand-colored hair in his eyes, unbuttoned red shirt falling open on a flabby fatty chest covered in wiry hairs, tries to kiss her, lunging like a barracuda with bared teeth.

  Trying to joke with him. Trying to fight him off.

  Five of them, or six? Another two waiting, by the boathouse, where they’ve forced a door open.

  Neighborhood guys, familiar faces. The one in the red shirt is a face you know.

  Momma pleading please guys leave us alone, okay? Please don’t hurt us, don’t hurt my daughter please she’s just a little girl, okay, guys?

  Hands clutching at you. Your hair, the nape of your neck. You try to duck away and a dark-haired boy blocks you gleefully, arms outstretched like it’s a basketball game, you’ve got the ball and he’s the guard towering over you.

  The guys are laughing at Momma crying, begging for them to leave her daughter alone, screaming Bethie run! Honey, get away!

  They let you break free, run a few yards, then catch you. So hard your arm is wrenched put of its socket. It’s a game.

  They let your mother break free, run barefoot and stumbling in the grass, then catch her. Three of them, like drunken dancers.

  Hey there foxy lady, whereya goin’?

  Mmmmm good-lookin’ show us your titties foxy lady heyheyHEY.

  Dragging you into the boathouse. Your mother, and you. You’re fighting them, kicking wildly and trying to scream but there’s a hot sweaty salt-tasting hand clamped over your mouth.

  The last you hear of your mother sobbing is Don’t! Don’t hurt her! Let her go!

  In Hiding

  WEDGED IN A CORNER of the boathouse. Behind, partially beneath stacked upside-down canoes.

  You’d crawled desperate to escape. On your stomach, on raw-scraped elbows. Dragging yourself like a wounded snake. As one of them kicked you. Cursed you kicking your back, your thighs, your legs as if he wanted to break all your bones in his fury.

  You’d twisted out of his grip. So small-boned, so skinny. No breasts, no hips. Not enough female flesh to grab on to.

  Where’s the little cunt, where the fuck is she hiding? . . .

  Wedged in the farthest corner of the boathouse. In the darkness smelling of stagnant water, soft-rotted wood. A sharp stink of urine. You were in terror of choking, suffocating. You’d squeezed into a space so small, your body was bent double. Your knees were drawn up against your chest, your shoulders hunched. Above you and to the side, stacked in tiers, were upside-down canoes. If they’d fallen, you would have been crushed.

  In terror of what they were doing to your mother. What you would have to endure, hearing.

  You did not think rape. The word rape was not yet a word in your vocabulary.

  You would think beat, hurt. Try to kill.

  You heard your mother’s cries, stifled screams. You heard her pleading with them. You heard them laugh at her.

  Teeeeena! Show your titties now Teeeena.

  Spread your legs Teeeena. Your cunt.

  You heard them kicking your mother. Soft-thudding blows against unresisting flesh. They would grab your mother’s slender ankles, spread her legs violently as if they wished to tear her legs from her body. They laughed at her cries of pain, her terror. They laughed at her feeble attempts to protect herself. They were reckless, euphoric. You would learn that they were high on a drug called crystal meth. In their excitement they forgot you. You were of no significance to them, who had an adult woman. They had torn your mother’s clothes from her body as if the female’s clothes infuriated them. They spat in your mother’s face as if her beauty infuriated them. They yanked at your mother’s hair wishing to pull it out by the roots. One of them would gouge repeatedly at her right eye with his thumb, wishing to blind her. You could not know how there was a radiant madness in their faces, a glisten to their wolf-eyes, a sheen to their damp teeth. You could not know how their eyes showed rims of white above the irises. How their bodies were coated in oily sweat. How they straddled your mother’s limp body and jammed their penises into her bleeding mouth and into her bleeding vagina and into her bleeding rectum. You would hear the noises of this rape not fully aware that what you heard was rape. You were fainting with pain from your dislocated arm, you were trying to breathe through the cracks in the splintery filthy floorboards. A few inches beneath these floorboards the scummy water of the lagoon lapped, rippled. You pressed the scraped and bleeding palms of your hands against your ears for twenty minutes and more begging God don’t let them kill Momma please God help us please.

  “Gang Rape”

  THE CALL CAME IN at 12:58 A.M. It was the third call of the night dispatching Zwaaf and Dromoor to the vicinity of Rocky Point Park.

  This crazed Fourth of July. Since dusk, NFPD sirens had mingled with the sirens of medical vehicles summoned to emergencies. There were fire sirens, burglar and car alarms. There were exploding fireworks at the Niagara River, in the publicly sanctioned annual display, and there were illegal detonating firecrackers through the city. There were reports of gunshots. Tourists to the Falls reported muggings, petty thefts from their broken-into vehicles parked in the large municipal lots near the river. Tourists in the hotels reported room break-ins, thefts. A record number of individuals, mostly male, mostly young, injured themselves and others setting off illegal fireworks and firecrackers. There were complaints of youths tossing lighted firecrackers through the windows of houses and passing vehicles. There were complaints of terrorized dogs and cats. There were complaints from boaters lodged against other, aggressive and drunken boaters. There were complaints of bands of drunken and/or drug-addled youths, Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic, congregating in the city’s parks. There were drug arrests, arrests for public drunkenness and drunken driving, public prostitution, solicitation, lewd and lascivious behavior. There were scattered fires, some of them suspicious. There were barbecue accidents and swimming pool accidents. There were arrests beneath the bleachers at the Rocky Point baseball field, in the men’s lavatories and in the parking lots. A considerable quantity of controlled substances was confiscated by police officers, predominantly marijuana, cocaine, and a powerful synthetic drug newly popular in the Niagara region, meth amphetamine.

  Meth was the worst. Fried and sizzled the brain.

  Zwaaf said, disgusted, “Any asshole who wants drugs, they should lock ’em up and give it to them. Let ’em kill themselves and good riddance.”

  Zwaaf and his younger partner Dromoor had made several of these arrests. Petty drug dealers, at the park. Other arrests that night had been for drunk driving, youths involved in muggings, assaults. A few weapons had been confisc
ated. Illegal fireworks. Fourth of July was a perverse holiday, Zwaaf believed. He’d come to hate it. He was a veteran of the NFPD patrol scene. His mood oscillated between scorn and dismay. He looked forward to retirement yet there were scores to settle. He behaved toward Dromoor in the way of an elder brother of an inscrutable youth whose differences from himself he wished to ignore. He complained to Dromoor that Dromoor was too fucking quiet even as he, Zwaaf, talked nonstop. Of the Fourth of July he complained it was a holiday with no point except breaking the law with fires, explosions, noises indistinguishable from gunshots. Dangerous and out-of-control like New Year’s Eve at midnight except worse than fucking New Year’s Eve because July was summer and everybody was out on the street.

  Dromoor only half-listened to Artie Zwaaf. Dromoor was not thinking that this Fourth of July was out-of-control, yet. There was something to come, maybe. To Dromoor always there was something-to-come. He was restless, edgy. He drove the patrol car which gave him something to do every minute, but still. He did not cherish quiet times. He had domestic problems of which he would not speak to Artie Zwaaf who was not to be trusted with confidences even if Dromoor was a man to confide in another which certainly he was not. Dromoor did not think his problems were profound or even unusual. He supposed that they were not even insoluble. They were vexing the way a too-tight collar is vexing around a dog’s neck, that the dog can feel but can’t see. Dromoor was becoming impatient patrolling the potholed Niagara Falls streets. He had hopes for moving up in the NFPD. He was the father of an eighteen-month infant and would be the father of a second infant in less than seven months. As a cop he had not been in personal danger since the shooting involving J. J. on that August night nearly two years before, he had scarcely had cause to draw his gun. He had not had cause to fire. But this Fourth of July night, the arrests he and Zwaaf had made had been without incident. Even the drug-addled had not resisted. No one had resisted arrest, even initially. No one had struggled when he was cuffed. No one had suddenly shoved at the officers, tried to run away. No one had wished to turn his back on the officers and run away. At the park, approaching a noisy crowd of black and Hispanic youths, Dromoor had wielded his nightstick. But he had not needed to use it.

  This call from Rocky Point Park. A 911 from a motorist who’d been stopped on a roadway by a child, a young girl of approximately eleven/twelve, disheveled, torn clothing, bleeding at the nose and mouth, saying her mother had been beaten, hurt bad, in the boathouse at the lagoon. And when they’d arrived at the site, there was the girl dazed sitting on the grass, and Dromoor saw the look of her, the torn clothing, bloodied face, the way one of her arms hung wrongly, and knew it must be rape.

  Medics were arriving. Dromoor and Zwaaf would be first to enter the boathouse. In the harsh unsparing light of their flashlights the naked woman lay open-mouthed, open-legged in the supplicant posture of death. She was scarcely breathing, almost imperceptibly her rib cage lifted and fell. She was bleeding from head wounds, a broken nose, torn lips. A pool of dark blood lay beneath her, spreading from between her legs. Her fingernails, which had been polished a glamorous gleaming crimson, matching her painted toenails, were jagged and broken. Her eyelids were only partially closed. Tears or mucus encrusted her lashes. Her hair, a tawny blond, was splotched with blood. Her breasts, which were full, heavy, lay partially flattened against her chest, and were also smeared with blood in the way of savage and exotic tattoos.

  Zwaaf muttered, “Jesus! They really got her.”

  Dromoor was squatting beside the unconscious woman. His flashlight shook in his awkwardly uplifted hand. Here, he amended, was rape. This was the rape. The other, the girl, the daughter, had been beaten but not raped.

  He had never been called to the scene of a gang rape before. He had never seen the victim of a gang rape except in photographs. He would not forget the sight.

  He knew the woman’s name: Martine Maguire.

  Teena, she was called. Lived in the neighborhood. A widow.

  Since their meeting at the Horseshoe, Dromoor had seen Teena Maguire a few times, at a distance. He had kept that distance between them believing it was to no purpose, otherwise. She had not seen him.

  Medics entered the boathouse. The scene was swathed in unnatural light more radiant than the sun.

  Witness

  YOU WERE TWELVE AT the time. Your thirteenth birthday would arrive abruptly, too soon in August, and depart mostly unheralded. For childhood belonged to before, now you had come to live in after.

  You would tell what you could remember.

  Many times you would tell. And retell.

  That night, the very night of the rape, in the emergency room at St. Mary’s where you and your unconscious mother were taken by ambulance, you were questioned. Before your grandmother and other relatives arrived at the hospital, you were questioned. You were eager to tell. All that you knew. You were desperate to cooperate. In the way of childish logic you believed that all that you could do would help your mother to live.

  Though one day Teena Maguire would curse the fact that she’d been kept alive, five days on a respirator and attached to IV tubes in intensive care at St. Mary’s, had not been put out of her misery with a bullet to the brain there on the boathouse floor, fucking bad luck she’d ever been born.

  The Enemy

  YOU WERE INSTRUCTED Take your time, Bethie.

  At the Eighth Precinct where police officers showed you photographs.

  Grandma brought you. From St. Mary’s to the police station she brought you. Your mother was still unconscious, on a life-support system. You were the sole witness.

  Trying to explain it happened so fast.

  So fast! And it was so dark! The men’s faces . . .

  Your mouth was sore, swollen. Every word you uttered hurt.

  There was a woman, not one of the detectives but a Family Services counselor. She smiled at you the way a kindergarten teacher might smile at her pupils. Telling you in a slow, careful voice that just because things had happened fast to you did not mean that you had to remember anything “fast.”

  Take your time, Bethie. This is very very important.

  So many pictures of young men and boys! Some of them were very young-looking, like kids from Baltic High. Some of the faces were familiar, or almost.

  Mostly these were white men. The rapists had all been white. Except dark-skinned, unshaven, with dark hair, heavy eyebrows. It scared you now, you could not have described their race. You would have to say white. White-but-dark. Darkish-skinned but white. You would have to say . . .

  Remembering how he’d kicked you. Kick-kick-kicked your back, your thighs and legs, laughing, trying to grab your ankles, clumsy and stumbling and giving up, the little cunt wasn’t worth the effort.

  If you found his face here! He would come back to kill you.

  He was the enemy. They were all the enemy. They knew your name, they knew your mother’s name. And where you lived, they knew. You began to shiver, you could not stop shivering. Your eyes were wet with tears. The detectives stared at you in silence. The Family Services woman took your hands, gently.

  Calling you Bethie. Saying it was all right you would be safe.

  The police would protect you, she said. You and your mother, the police will protect you. Please believe us.

  You did not believe. You did not know what to believe.

  You continued to look at the pictures. Saw a familiar face, and pointed: him?

  No. Changed your mind. No, maybe not. They looked so much like one another, guys you saw every day on the street.

  At the 7-Eleven where Momma was always shopping. At the Huron Shopping Center. Driving by on Ninth Street these muggy hot summer evenings, and through the park, a hallf-dozen yelling, hooting guy hanging out of a noisy old car with oversized tires.

  This one! Suddenly, you were sure.

  The guy with the sand-colored hair falling in his face. Sexy like a rock star except his face was broken out in pimples.

 
Jeering and nasty he’d been, rushing at you. Grabbing at your mother and trying to kiss her. Grabbing at her breasts. Teeeena!

  You realized now, he’d led the others. He was their leader. You knew.

  This one. Yes.

  Almost, you knew this guy’s name. Pick?

  On Eleventh Street near the lumberyard there was a family named Pick living in a large yellow-tile house. The front yard was grassless, but the driveway was crammed with vehicles—cars, motorcycles, a motorboat on a trailer. Leila Pick was three years older than you at Baltic Junior High, a fattish, aggressive girl. There were older brothers in the family, one of them named Marvin.

  Excited, you knew this was him: Marvin Pick.

  Later you would identify his brother, though you didn’t know his name: Lloyd. The Pick features were unmistakable. A wide-boned face, thick nose with dark nostrils. A low forehead, sand-colored hair.

  Marvin Pick was twenty-six; his brother Lloyd was twenty-four.

  Here! This one, too.

  Jimmy DeLucca, this young man would be. It scared you to see his picture close up. Sneering at Momma in his angry, nasty voice, Cunt dirty cunt show us your titties cunt!

  You would not find the one who’d kicked you. He’d had a mustache, stubbled jaw. The imprint of his angry fingers in bruised welts on your ankles. Whereya goin’ you little cunt?!

  Except: the detectives said to try again. And you did. And there he was.

  “Suspects,” they were called. As if they hadn’t done what they’d done to you and your mother but were only “suspected” of doing it!

  You identified just five of them. By their mug shots, and in lineups at the precinct. Staring at groups of six to eight young men through a one-way window. Assured that they couldn’t see you though you saw them. In the bright unsparing lights of the viewing room, the rapists were not so confident. Their mouths were not so jeering. Their eyes were not so glassy-hard.