by Jack Ketchum
And I ask myself: Whom did I hate? Whom and what did I fear?
In the basement, with Ruth, I began to learn that anger, hate, fear and loneliness are all one button awaiting the touch of just a single finger to set them blazing toward destruction.
And I learned that they can taste like winning.
I watched Willie step back. For once he didn’t look clumsy. His shoulder caught her squarely in the stomach, lifted her off her feet.
I suppose her only hope was that one of them would miss and smash his head against the wall. But nobody was going to. She was tiring. There was nowhere to maneuver, nowhere to go. Nothing to do but take it till she fell. And that would be soon now.
Woofer got a running start. She had to bend her knees in order not to take it in the groin.
“Cry, goddammit!” Willie yelled. Like the others he was breathing hard. He turned to me.
“She won’t cry,” he said.
“She don’t care,” said Woofer.
“She’ll cry,” said Willie. “I’ll make her.”
“Too much pride,” said Ruth behind me. “Pride goeth before a fall. You ought to all remember that. Pride falls.”
Donny rammed at her.
Football was his game. Her head snapped back against the cinder block. Her arms fell open. The look in her eyes was glazed now.
She slid a few inches down the wall.
Then she stopped and held there.
Ruth sighed.
“That’ll be enough for now, boys,” she said. “You’re not going to get her to cry. Not this time.”
She held out her arm, beckoning.
“Come on.”
You could see they weren’t done yet. But Ruth sounded bored and final.
Then Willie muttered something about stupid whores, and one by one they filed past us.
I was last to leave. It was hard to take my eyes away.
That this could happen.
I watched her slide down the wall to squat on the cold concrete floor.
I’m not sure she was ever aware of me.
“Let’s go,” said Ruth.
She closed the metal door and bolted it shut behind me.
Meg was left in there in the dark. Behind the door to a meat locker. We went upstairs and poured some Cokes. Ruth got out cheddar cheese and crackers. We sat around the dining room table.
I could still hear Susan crying in the bedroom, softer now. Then Willie got up and turned on the television and Truth or Consequences came on and you couldn’t hear her anymore.
We watched for a while.
Ruth had a women’s magazine open in front of her on the table. She was smoking a Tareyton, flipping through the magazine, drinking from her Coke bottle.
She came to a photo—a lipstick ad—and stopped.
“I don’t see it,” she said. “The woman’s ordinary. You see it?”
She held up the magazine.
Willie looked and shrugged and bit into a cracker. But I thought the woman was pretty. About Ruth’s age, maybe a little younger, but pretty.
Ruth shook her head.
“I see her everywhere I look,” she said, “I swear it. Everywhere. Name’s Suzy Parker. Big model. And I just don’t see it. A redhead. Maybe that’s it. Men like the redheads. But hell, Meg’s got red hair. And Meg’s hair’s prettier than that, doncha think?”
I looked at the picture again. I agreed with her.
“I just don’t see it,” she said, frowning. “Meg’s definitely prettier than that. A whole lot prettier.”
“Sure she is,” said Donny.
“World’s crazy,” said Ruth. “It just don’t make any sense to me at all.”
She cut a slice of cheese and placed it on a cracker.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Get your mom to let you sleep over at my house tonight,” said Donny. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
We were standing at the bridge on Maple skimming stones down into the water. The brook was clear and sluggish.
“What’s wrong with talking now?”
“Nothing.”
But he didn’t say what was on his mind.
I don’t know why I resisted the idea of sleeping over. Maybe it was knowing I’d get more involved with them somehow. Or maybe it was just that I knew what my mom would say—there were girls at the Chandlers’ these days, and staying over there would not seem so clear-cut to her anymore.
She should only know, I thought.
“Willie wants to talk to you too,” said Donny.
“Willie does?”
“Yeah.”
I laughed. The notion of Willie having something on his mind worth actually speaking about.
Actually it was intriguing.
“Well in that case I guess I’ll just have to, then, won’t I,” I said.
Donny laughed too, and skimmed a long one three skips down across the dappling bands of sunlight.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
My mother wasn’t happy.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Mom, I sleep there all the time.”
“Not lately you don’t.”
“You mean since Meg and Susan?”
“That’s right.”
“Look. It’s no big deal. It’s the same as before. The guys get the bunk beds and Meg and Susan are in Ruth’s room.”
“Mrs. Chandler’s room.”
“Right. Mrs. Chandler’s room.”
“So where is Mrs. Chandler?”
“On the couch. On the pullout in the living room. What’s the big deal?”
“You know what’s the big deal.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes you do.”
“No I don’t.”
“What?” said my father, walking into the kitchen from the living room. “What big deal is that?”
“He wants to stay over there again,” said my mother. She was snapping green beans into a colander.
“What? Over there?”
“Yes.”
“So let him.” He sat down at the kitchen table and opened up his newspaper.
“Robert, there are two young girls there now.”
“So?”
She sighed. “Please,” she said. “Please don’t be dense, Robert.”
“Dense, hell,” said my father. “Let him. Is there any coffee?”
“Yes,” she said. She sighed again and brushed her hands off on her apron.
I got up and got to the coffeepot ahead of her and turned on the flame beneath it. She looked at me and then went back to the beans.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
“I didn’t say you could go,” said my mother.
I smiled. “You didn’t say I couldn’t, either.”
She looked at my father and shook her head. “Dammit, Robert,” she said.
“Right,” said my father. And then he read his paper.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“We told her about The Game,” said Donny.
“Who?”
“Ruth. My mom. Who else, shit-for-brains?”
Donny was alone in the kitchen when I came in, making a peanut butter sandwich that I guess was dinner that night.
There were smears of peanut butter and grape jelly and bread crumbs on the counter. Just for fun I counted the sets of silverware in the drawer. There were still only five.
“You told her?”
He nodded. “Woofer did.”
He took a bite of the sandwich and sat down at the dining room table. I sat across from him. There was a half-inch cigarette burn in the wood I hadn’t seen before.
“Jesus. What’d she say?”
“Nothin’. It was weird. It was like she knew, you know?”
“Knew? Knew what?”
“Everything. Like it was no sweat. Like she figured we were doing it all along. Like every kid did.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I swear.”
“Bullshit.”
“You told her? Me? Eddie? Everybody?”
“Like I said she didn’t care. Hey. Would you please not blow your cool on this, Davy? It didn’t bother her.”
“Denise? You told her about Denise too?”
“Yeah. Everything.”
“You said she was naked?”
I couldn’t believe it. I’d always thought that Willie was the stupid one. I watched him eat the sandwich. He smiled at me and shook his head.
“I’m telling you. You don’t have to worry about it,” he said.
“Donny.”
“Really.”
“Donny.”
“Yes, Davy.”
“Are you nuts?”
“No, Davy.”
“Do you realize for a goddamn second what would happen to me if …”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you, for God’s sake. Will you stop being such a friggin’ queer about it? It’s my mom, for God’s sake. Remember?”
“Oh that makes me feel just fine. Your mom knows we tie naked little girls to trees. Great.”
He sighed. “David, if I’d known you were gonna be such an amazing retard about it I wouldn’t of told you.”
“I’m the retard, right?”
“Yeah.” He was pissed now. He popped the last gooey comer of the sandwich into his mouth. He stood up.
“Look, jerk. What do you think is going on in the shelter right now? Right this minute?”
I just looked at him. How did I know? Who cared?
Then it dawned on me. Meg was there.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. He went to the refrigerator for a Coke.
“Bullshit.”
He laughed. “Will you stop saying bullshit? Look, don’t believe me. Go take a look. Hell, I just came up for a sandwich.”
I ran downstairs. I could hear him laughing behind me.
It was getting dark outside so the basement lights were on, naked bulbs over the washer/dryer and under the stairs and over the sump pump in the corner.
Willie was standing behind Ruth at the door to the shelter.
They both had flashlights in their hands.
Ruth lit hers and waved it at me once like a cop at a roadblock.
“Here’s Davy,” she said.
Willie gave me a glance. Who gives a shit.
My mouth was open. It felt dry. I licked my lips. I nodded to Ruth and looked around the corner through the doorway.
And it was hard to comprehend at first—I guess because maybe it was out of context, and probably because it was Meg, and definitely because Ruth was there. It felt dreamlike—or like some game you play on Halloween when everyone is in costume and nobody’s quite recognizable themselves even though you know who they are. Then Donny came downstairs and slapped his hand down on my shoulder. He offered me the Coke.
“See?” he said. “I told you.”
I did see.
They’d taken ten-penny nails and driven them into the beams Willie Sr. had lain along the ceiling—two nails, about three feet apart.
They’d cut two lengths of clothesline and tied Meg’s wrists and looped a line over each of the nails and then run the lines down to the legs of the heavy worktable, tying them off down there rather than up at the nail so that they could be adjusted, tightened, just by untying each one and pulling it around the loop and then tying it tighter again.
Meg was standing on a small pile of books—three thick red volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia.
She was gagged and blindfolded.
Her feet were bare. Her shorts and shortsleeve blouse were dirty. In the space between the two, stretched out as she was, you could see her navel.
Meg was an inny.
Woofer paced around in front of her running the beam of his flashlight up and down her body.
There was a bruise just under the blindfold on her left cheek.
Susan sat on a carton of canned vegetables, watching. A blue strand of ribbon made a bow in her hair.
Off in the comer I could see a pile of blankets and an air mattress. I realized Meg had been sleeping there. I wondered for how long.
“We’re all here,” said Ruth.
A dim amber light bled in from the rest of the basement but mostly it was just Woofer’s beam in there and the shadows moved erratically along with him when he moved, making things look strange and fluid and ghostly. The wire mesh over the single high window seemed to shift back and forth by subtle inches. The two four-by-four wooden posts supporting the ceiling slid across the room at odd angles. The ax, pick, crowbar and shovel stacked in the corner opposite Meg’s bed appeared to switch positions with one another, looming and shrinking as you watched, shapeshifting.
The fallen fire extinguisher crawled across the floor.
But it was Meg’s own shadow that dominated the room—head back, arms wide apart, swaying. It was an image straight out of all our horror comics, out of The Black Cat with Lugosi and Karloff, out of Famous Monsters of Filmland, out of every cheap twenty-five cent paperback historical thriller about the Inquisition ever written. Most of which I figured we’d collected.
It was easy to imagine torchlight, strange instruments and processions, braziers full of hot coals.
I shivered. Not at the chill but at the potential.
“The Game is she’s got to tell,” said Woofer.
“Okay. Tell what?” Ruth asked.
“Tell anything. Something secret.”
Ruth nodded, smiling. “Sounds right. Only how’s she going to do that with the gag on?”
“You don’t want her to tell right away, Mom,” said Willie. “Anyway, you always know when they’re ready.”
“You sure? You want to tell, Meggy?” said Ruth.
“You ready?”
“She’s not ready,” insisted Woofer. But he needn’ t have bothered. Meg didn’t make a sound.
“So now what?” Ruth asked.
Willie pushed off from the doorjamb where he was leaning and ambled into the room.
“Now we take a book away,” he said.
He bent over, pulled out the middle one and stepped back.
The ropes were tighter now.
Willie and Woofer both had their flashlights on. Ruth’s was still at her side, unlit.
I could see some red around Meg’s wrists from the pull of the ropes. Her back arched slightly. The short-sleeve shirt rode up. She was only just able to stand with her feet down flat on the two remaining books and I could already see the strain in her calves and thighs. She went up on her toes for a moment to take the pressure off her wrists and then sank down again.
Willie switched off his flashlight. It was spookier that way.
Meg just hung there, swaying slightly.
“Confess,” said Woofer. Then he laughed. “No. Don’t,” he said.
“Do another book,” said Donny.
I glanced at Susan to see how she was taking this. She was sitting with her hands folded in the lap of her dress and her face looked very serious and she was staring intently at Meg but there was no way to read what she was thinking or feeling at all.
Willie bent down and pulled out the book.
She was up on the balls of her feet now.
Still she made no sound.
The muscles of her legs defined themselves sharply against her skin.
“Let’s see how long she can go like that,” said Donny. “It’s gonna hurt after a while.”
“Nah,” said Woofer. “It’s still too easy. Let’s do the last one. Get ’er up on her tiptoes.”
“I want to watch her a while. See what happens.”
But the fact was that nothing was happening. Meg seemed determined to tough this out. And she was strong.
“Don’t you want to give her a chance to confess? Isn’t that the idea?” asked Ruth.
“Nah,” said Woofer. “Still too soon. C’mon.
Th
is is no good. Take the other book, Will.”
Willie did.
And then Meg did make some kind of sound behind the gag, just once, a sort of tiny exhaled groan as all at once just breathing became harder. Her blouse pulled up to right beneath her breasts . and I could see her belly rise and fall in an irregular labored rhythm against her rib cage. Her head fell back for a moment and then came forward again.
Her balance was precarious. She began to sway.
Her face flushed. Her muscles strained with tension.
We watched, silent.
She was beautiful.
The vocal sounds that accompanied her breathing were coming more frequently now as the strain increased. She couldn’t help it. Her legs began to tremble. First the calves and then the thighs.
A thin sheen of sweat formed over her ribs, glistened on her thighs.
“We should strip her,” Donny said.
The words just hung there for a moment, suspended as Meg was suspended, tipping a balance that was every bit as precarious.
Suddenly it was me who felt dizzy.
“Yeah,” said Woofer.
Meg had heard. She shook her head. There was indignation, anger and fear there. Sounds came from behind the gag. No. No. No.
“Shut up,” said Willie.
She started trying to jump, pulling on the ropes, trying to throw them off the nails, squirming. But all she was doing was hurting herself, chafing her wrists.
She didn’t seem to care. She wasn’t going to let it happen.
She kept trying.
No. No.
Willie walked over and thumped her on the head with the book.
She slumped back, stunned.
I looked at Susan. Her hands were still clasped together in her lap but the knuckles were white now. She looked directly at her sister, not at us. Her teeth were biting hard and steadily at her lower lip.
I couldn’t watch her.
I cleared my throat and found something like a voice.
“Hey, uh … guys … listen, I don’t really think …”
Woofer whirled on me.
“We’ve got permission!” he screamed. “We do! I say we take off her clothes! I say strip her!”