by Jack Ketchum
“Nah,” said Donny. “She reads all the time.”
“She hides. I think she hides.”
Ruth’s eyes still looked strange and glittery to me, and I guess to the others too. Because nobody contradicted her any further.
“How about it, Ma?” said Woofer. “Can we?”
Our card game was over but Ruth still sat there shuffling the deck. Then she nodded.
“She could use it I suppose,” she said dully.
“We’ll have to strip her,” said Willie.
“I’ll do that,” Ruth said. “You boys remember.”
“Yeah,” said Woofer. “We remember. No touching.”
“That’s right.”
I looked at Willie and Donny. Willie was scowling. He had his hands in his pockets. He shuffled his feet, shoulders hunched.
What a retard, I thought.
But Donny looked thoughtful, like a full-grown man with a purpose and a job to do now and he was considering the best and most efficient way to go about it.
Woofer smiled brightly.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get her!”
We trooped downstairs, Ruth trailing a ways behind.
Donny untied her, legs first and then the hands, gave her a moment to massage her wrists and then tied them back together again in front of her. He took off the gag and put it in his pocket.
Nobody mentioned the bums or Coke stains on her dress. Though they had to be the first thing you noticed.
She licked her lips.
“A drink?” she asked.
“In a minute,” said Donny. “We’re going upstairs.”
“We are?”
“Yeah.”
She didn’t ask why.
Holding onto the rope, Donny led her upstairs, with Woofer ahead of him and Willie and I directly in back. Again Ruth lagged behind.
I was very aware of her back there. There was something wrong with her—that I was sure of. She seemed tired, distant, not wholly there. Her footsteps on the stairs seemed lighter than ours were, lighter than they should be, barely a whisper—though she moved slowly and with difficulty, like she’d gained twenty pounds. I didn’t know much about mental problems then but I knew what I was watching wasn’t entirely normal. She bothered me.
When we got upstairs Donny sat Meg down at the dining room table and got her a glass of water from the kitchen sink.
It was the first I’d noticed the sink. It was piled high with dirty dishes, more than they could have used in just one day. More like two or three days’ worth was stuffed in there.
And seeing that made me notice other things, made me look around a bit.
I was not a kid who noticed dust. Who did? But I noticed how dusty and dirty the place was now, most visibly on the end tables in the living room behind me where you could see the streaks of hand prints across the surface. There were toast crumbs on the table in front of Meg. The ashtray beside her looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in decades. I saw two wooden matches lying on the throw rug in the hall next to a piece of paper that looked like the crumpled-up top of a cigarette pack, casually discarded.
I had the strangest feeling. Of something winding down. Disintegrating slowly.
Meg finished her glass of water and asked for another. Please, she said.
“Don’t worry,” said Willie. “You’ll get water.”
Meg looked puzzled.
“We’re gonna wash you,” he said.
“What?”
“The boys thought it would be nice if you had a shower,” said Ruth. “You’d like that wouldn’t you.”
Meg hesitated. You could see why. That wasn’t exactly the way Willie had put it. Willie had said we’re gonna wash you.
“Y-yes,” she said.
“Very thoughtful of them too,” said Ruth. “I’m glad you’re glad.”
It was like she was talking to herself, almost mumbling.
Donny and I exchanged a look. I could see he was a little nervous about her.
“Think I’ll have a beer,” said Ruth.
She got up and went to the kitchen.
“Anybody join me?”
Nobody seemed to want any. That in itself was unusual. She peered into the refrigerator. She looked around. Then she closed it again.
“None left,” she said, shuffling back to the dining room. “Why didn’t somebody buy beer?”
“Mom,” said Donny. “We can’t. We’re kids. They don’t let us buy beer.”
Ruth chuckled. “Right,” she said.
Then she turned around again. “I’ll have a scotch instead.”
She dug into the cabinet and came up with a bottle. She walked back into the dining room, picked up Meg’s water glass and poured herself about two inches of the stuff.
“We gonna do this or not?” said Willie.
Ruth drank. “Sure we are,” she said.
Meg looked from one of us to the other. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Do what? I thought I was … I thought you were letting me have a shower.”
“We are,” said Donny.
“We have to supervise, though,” said Ruth.
She took another drink and the liquor seemed to strike a sudden fire in back of her eyes.
“Make sure you get clean,” she said.
Meg understood her then.
“I don’t want it,” she said.
“Don’t matter what you want,” said Willie. “What matters is what we want.”
“You stink,” said Woofer. “You need a shower.”
“It’s decided already,” said Donny.
She looked at Ruth. Ruth hunched over her drink watching her like a tired old bird of prey.
“Why can’t you just… give me … a little privacy?”
Ruth laughed. “I’d have thought you’d have about had it with privacy, down there all day.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean…”
“I know what you mean. And the answer is we can’t trust you. Can’t trust you one way, can’t trust you another. You’ll go in there, throw a little water on yourself, and that’s not clean.”
“No I wouldn’t. I swear I wouldn’t. I’d kill for a shower.”
Ruth shrugged. “Well then. You got one. And you don’t have to kill for it, do you?”
“Please.”
Ruth waved her away. “Get outta that dress now, before you get me mad.”
Meg looked at each of us one at a time and then I guess she figured that a supervised shower was better than no shower at all because she sighed.
“My hands,” she said.
“Right,” said Ruth. “Unzip her, Donny. Then undo her hands. Then do ’em up again.”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
I was a little surprised too. I guess she’d decided to relax on the no touching rule.
Meg stood up and so did Donny. The dress unzipped to halfway down her back. He untied her. Then he went behind her again to slip the dress off her shoulders.
“Can I have a towel please, at least?”
Ruth smiled. “You’re not wet yet,” she said. She nodded to Donny.
Meg closed her eyes and stood very still and rigid while Donny took the frilly short sleeves and dragged them down over her arms and bared her breasts and then her hips and thighs, and then it lay at her feet. She stepped out of it. Her eyes were still shut tight. It was as though if she couldn’t see us then we couldn’t see her.
“Tie her again,” said Ruth.
I realized I was holding my breath.
Donny walked around in front of her. She put her hands together for him and Donny started to tie them.
“No,” said Ruth. “Put them behind her this time.”
Meg’s eyes flashed open.
“Behind me! How am I going to wash if…?”
Ruth stood up. “Goddammit! Don’t you sass me, girl! If I say behind you then it’s behind you and if I say stuff ’em up your ass then you’ll do that too! Don’t you sass me! You hear? Goddammit
! Goddamn you!
“I’ll wash you—that’s how! Now do as I say. Fast!”
And you could see that Meg was scared but she didn’t resist as Donny took her arms behind her and tied them at the wrists. She’d closed her eyes again. Only this time there were little pools of wet around them.
“All right, head her in,” said Ruth.
Donny marched her down the narrow hallway to the bathroom. We followed. The bathroom was small but all of us crowded inside. Woofer sat on the hamper. Willie leaned against the sink. I stood next to him.
In the hall opposite the bathroom there was a closet, and Ruth was rummaging around in there. She came out with a pair of yellow rubber gloves.
She put them on. They went all the way up to her elbows.
She leaned over and turned on the tap in the bathtub.
The tap marked “H” for hot.
That tap only.
She let it run awhile.
She tested it with her hand, letting it run down over the rubber glove.
Her mouth was a grim straight line.
The water ran hard and steaming. Pounded against the drain. Then she threw the setting to “Shower” and closed the clear plastic curtain.
The steam billowed up.
Meg’s eyes were still shut. Tears streaked down her face.
The steam threw a mist over all of us now.
Suddenly Meg felt it. And knew what it meant.
She opened her eyes and threw herself back, frightened, screaming, but Donny already had one arm and Ruth grabbed the other. She fought them, bucking and twisting, screaming no no. And she was strong. She was still strong.
Ruth lost her grip.
“God damn you!” she bellowed. “You want me to get your sister? You want me to get your precious Susan? You want her in here instead? Burning?”
Meg whirled on her. Suddenly furious. Wild. Insane.
“Yes!” she screamed. “Yes! You bitch! Get Susan! Get her! I don’t give a damn anymore!”
Ruth looked at her, eyes narrowed. Then she looked at Willie. She shrugged.
“Get her,” she said mildly.
He didn’t have to.
I turned as he passed me and then saw him stop because Susan was there already, watching us, standing in the hall. And she was crying too.
Meg saw her too.
And she crumbled.
“Noooooo,” she cried. “Noooooo. Pleeease …”
And for a moment we stood silent in the warm heavy mist listening to the scalding stream and to her sobbing. Knowing what would happen. Knowing how it would be.
Then Ruth threw the curtain aside.
“Get her in,” she said to Donny. “And be careful of yourself.”
I watched them put her in and Ruth adjust the shower nozzle to send the scorching spray up slowly over her legs and thighs and belly and finally up over her breasts to shatter across her nipples while her arms strained desperately to break free behind her and everywhere the water hit went suddenly red, red, the color of pain—and at last I couldn’t stand the screaming.
And I ran.
Chapter Thirty-Four
But only once.
I didn’t run again.
After that day I was like an addict, and my drug was knowing. Knowing what was possible. Knowing how far it could go. Where they’d dare to take it all.
It was always they. I stood outside, or felt I did. From both Meg and Susan on the one side and the Chandlers on the other. I’d participated in nothing directly. I’d watched. Never touched. And that was all. As long as I maintained that stance I could imagine I was, if not exactly blameless, not exactly culpable either.
It was like sitting in a movie. Sometimes it was a scary movie, sure—where you worried whether the hero and heroine were going to make it through all right. But just that. Just a movie. You’d get up when it was over properly scared and excited and walk out of the dark and leave it all behind.
And then sometimes it was more like the kind of movies that came along later in the Sixties—foreign movies, mostly—where the dominant feeling you had was of inhabiting some fascinating, hypnotic density of obscure illusion, of layers and layers of meaning that in the end indicated a total absence of meaning, where actors with cardboard faces moved passively through surreal nightmare landscapes, empty of emotions, adrift.
Like me.
Of course we wrote and directed these mind-films of ours as well as watched them. So I suppose it was inevitable that we add to our cast of characters.
I suppose it was also inevitable that Eddie Crocker be our first audition.
It was a bright sunny morning toward the end of July, three weeks into Meg’s captivity, when I first went over and found him there.
In the few days since the shower they’d let her keep her clothes on—there were blisters and they were allowing them to heal—and they were treating her pretty well all told, feeding her soup and sandwiches, giving her water when she wanted it. Ruth had even put sheets over the air mattress and swept the cigarette butts off the floor. And it was tough to say whether Willie did more complaining about his latest toothache or about how boring things had gotten.
With Eddie, that changed.
She still had her clothes on when I got there—a pair of faded jeans and a blouse—but they had her bound and gagged again, lying on her stomach over the worktable, each arm tied to one of the legs of the table, feet tied together on the floor.
Eddie had one of his Keds off and was pounding her ass.
Then he’d quit for a while and Willie’d work on her back, legs, and rear with a leather belt. They hit her hard. Eddie especially.
Woofer and Donny stood watching.
I watched too. But only briefly.
I didn’t like him there.
Eddie was too much into it.
It was far too easy to picture him walking down the street that day grinning at us with the black-snake between his teeth, flinging it over and over at us until the snake lay dead in the street.
This was the kid who would bite the head off a frog.
This was the kid who would just as soon hit you in the head with a rock or whack you in the balls with a stick as look at you.
Eddie was passionate.
It was hot that day and the sweat rolled off him, streamed out of his close-cut carrot-red hair and down across his forehead. As usual he had his shirt off so we could see his great physique and the smell of his sweat rolled off him too.
He smelled salty and sticky-sweet, like old bad meat.
I didn’t stay.
I went upstairs.
Susan was putting together a jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table. There was a half-empty glass of milk beside her.
The television, for once, was silent. You could hear the slaps and laughter from below.
I asked for Ruth.
Ruth, Susan said, was lying in the bedroom. One of her headaches. She’d been having them a lot lately.
So we sat there saying nothing. I got myself a Budweiser from the fridge. Susan was doing pretty well on the puzzle. She had more than half of it done. The picture was called “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri,” by George Caleb Bingham and showed a grim gnarly old man in a funny pointed cap and a dreamy-faced teenager in a canoe paddling downstream at sunset, a black cat sitting tethered to the prow. She had the edges in and the cat and the canoe and most of the man and boy. There was only the sky and the river and some of the trees left now.
I watched her fit a piece into the river. I sipped the beer.
“So how you doin’?” I asked.
She didn’t look up. “Fine,” she said.
I heard laughter from the shelter.
She tried another piece. It didn’t fit.
“That bother you?” I said. I meant the sounds.
“Yes,” she said. But she didn’t say it as though it did. It was just a fact of life.
“A lot?”
“Uh-huh.”
I nodded. There was nothin
g much to say then after that. I watched her and drank the beer. Pretty soon she had the boy completed and was working on the trees.
“I can’t make them stop, y’know?” I said.
“I know.”
“Eddie’s there. For one thing.”
“I know.”
I finished the beer.
“I would if I could,” I said. I wondered if it was true. So did she.
“Yes?” she said.
And for the first time she looked up at me, eyes very mature and thoughtful. A lot like her sister’s.
“’Course I would.”
She went back to the puzzle again, frowning.
“Maybe they’ll get tired,” I said, realizing as soon as I said it how lame that sounded. Susan didn’t answer.
But then a moment later the sounds did stop and I heard footsteps come up the stairs.
It was Eddie and Willie. Both of them flushed, shirts open. Willie’s middle a fat, dead-white ugly roll. They ignored us and went to the refrigerator. I watched them crack a Coke for Willie and a Bud for Eddie and then push things around looking for something to eat. I guess there wasn’t much because they closed it again.
“You gotta give it to her,” Eddie was saying. “She don’t cry much. She ain’t chicken.”
If I had felt detached from all this, Eddie was in another realm entirely. Eddie’s voice was like ice. It was Willie who was fat and ugly but it was Eddie who disgusted me.
Willie laughed. “That’s ‘cause she’s all cried out,” he said. “You should’ve seen her after her scrubbin’ the other day.”
“Yeah. I guess. You think we should bring something down for Donny and Woofer?”
“They didn’t ask for nothin’. They want it, let ’em get it.”
“I wish you had some food, man,” said Eddie.
And they started to walk back down. They continued to ignore us. That was fine with me. I watched them disappear down the stairwell.
“So what are you gonna do?” said Eddie. I felt his voice drift up at me like a wisp of toxic smoke. “Kill her?”
I froze.
“Nah,” said Willie.
And then he said something else but the sound of their footsteps on the stairs drowned it out for us.
Kill her? I felt the words slide along my spine. Somebody walking over my grave, my mother would say.