Lance

by Ronald L Donaghe

  He wasn’t there.

  The lump of dread in my stomach grew a little heavier. I tried to remember if Lance had told me where he’d meet me. Only there just wasn’t anywhere else he would normally be, so I went back out to the parking lot to try to figure out some way to clean up the cow manure. I was tired and wanted to start home because, after dark, the fifty miles seems long.

  Back at the pickup, I unlocked the passenger-side door and opened the glove box where I keep a flashlight. There was cow manure in the seat all right, a big, green, ten-pound, stinking pile of it; but I had lucked out. Most of it had landed on my Levi jacket, which was laying on the seat. So I slid the jacket out on the passenger side, then stepping backward, and quickly pivoting, I slung the jacket out over the other cars still there. I heard it come to a sloppy, wet stop on what sounded like the hood of a car.

  People would recognize the jacket.

  I just didn’t care.

  The lump grew heavier, and I was getting worried. Lance could have gone home with Mama and Trinket, since Mama drove tonight. So I went back in the hallway at the school and dropped a dime in the box at the payphone by the principal’s office. Off toward the gymnasium, I could hear the pounding of the music and the noise of the crowd.

  The phone rang about ten times before I hung up, realizing Mama wouldn’t have had time to get home, yet.

  That’s when Casey Zumwalt came into the brightly lit hallway. He looked like he was about to puke, and when he saw me, the darkest look of fear animated his face.

  “God! Will! I’m glad I found you!” Casey said, sounding pumped with hysteria.

  It scared me and I began to shake. “It’s Lance, isn’t it?”

  He just nodded, and put up both hands toward me, as if he were warding me off. “Locker room,” he said, turning and running back down the hall. “The girls’ locker room!” he shouted, as he shoved open the double doors at the end and stepped out into the night.

  I crashed through the same doors. Within a few seconds, I was across the parking lot and skidding around the bleachers. When I got to the girls’ locker room, I threw open the outer door and ran inside. Here, the lights were off except for the dim night lights in metal cages inside the showers. The place was empty.

  I wondered if Casey was just putting on an act since he never liked Lance. But I shook off that thought, because he had been genuinely scared. I was more worried than ever, and started to run back out, having no idea what I should do. That’s when I heard Lance’s unmistakable whimpering coming from the showers—a sound I sometimes hear at night when he’s sleeping and dreaming about what must be one of his stepfather’s beatings, or some other kind of deep pain. The whimpering sound just tears me up. There’s no spelling for it, no vowels to encompass it.

  As I rounded the corner, I felt for the light switch, then flicked it on. At first I couldn’t tell what I was looking at, then I realized that Lance was lying in a heap of torn and disheveled clothing, his pants and underwear shoved down around his calves, his shirt ripped open from the back, his bare bottom red and splotched, and I was afraid to see his face.

  I sat down by him and rolled him into my lap. His head lolled forward, then kind of jerked, and he moaned. He was unconscious. His bottom lip was swollen and had been split on the lower right side. I hugged him to my chest, feeling the tears well up in my eyes. “Not again!” I whispered. “Why do they always go for your beautiful face!”

  I rocked him back and forth, finally relieved to see him awaken. But when he was conscious, he began to flail his arms and shout: “No! No. No!”

  So I held tighter. “It’s me, Lance! It’s Will!”

  When he heard my voice, something inside seemed to snap him into full consciousness. He scrambled out of my arms and began pulling up his pants. That’s when I saw a trickle of blood on his thigh.

  “Wait!” I said, as I scrambled to my feet. I grabbed his hands and he tried to fight me.

  “Let me dress, Will! This is embarrassing. Why—”

  “You’re bleeding,” I said. “Let me see what it is.”

  So, instead of pulling his clothing on, he sat down and I helped him out of his sneakers and pulled his pants and underwear off. He laid back, beginning to shiver. My own hands were shaking as I gently pushed his thighs apart. In the glare of the lights, his legs were ghostly white, and the thin line of blood was dark on his inner thigh.

  I wiped the blood away with my fingers but couldn’t see where the bleeding came from.

  “Where does it hurt, Lance? I can’t—”

  Lance pulled up his balls. “It kind of stings, here,” he said. He was looking down at himself but couldn’t see.

  I did.

  I tried to keep my face from revealing the horror of what I saw and fought to keep from puking. He wasn’t cut badly, and the bleeding had already stopped, but it wasn’t that which sickened and frightened me. It was what appeared to have almost been done.

  A thin cut—unmistakably from a knife blade—had been made at the base of his ball sac, just enough to cause a little bleeding.

  “It burns down there,” Lance said, again. “What is it?”

  I didn’t want to tell him what I suspected. “Someone must’ve scratched you down here,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, because I knew it wasn’t just a scratch.

  I wiped away the blood and held his balls, gently pushing the side of my forefinger against the cut, then brought my finger up to the light. I was relieved to see that he wasn’t still bleeding.

  Then I helped him get dressed.

  Anger and hatred burned in his eyes as he looked at me. For a moment, I was afraid he was angry with me.

  Then, as I stood up, he came into my arms and began to cry.

  “They tried to rape me!” he said, into my shoulder, and I could feel his hot breath on my neck. I held him tight.

  “Who, Lance?”

  He pulled himself out of my arms, looking up at me, his face so pitiful with bruised lips and the fear still shining in his eyes. “I don’t know! They jumped me from behind, but I didn’t recognize their voices.”

  “Not Dick Lamb, or Casey? None of the guys on the team?”

  Lance shook his head, then dropped his eyes. “They called me your wife! They said they’d show me what real guys do with girls.”

  My mind was racing. If Lance didn’t know who it was, then they didn’t go to school at Animas—though they could’ve been guys from Lordsburg, or even townspeople. Of course, I probably would’ve known who the attackers were, since I’d lived here all my life. So my bets lay on a Cotton City bunch. I would’ve bet on Rick, except Lance knew his voice. The chances were slimmer that it was other high school boys from Lordsburg. Still, I’d know a lot of them, too, since we played them in football and basketball.

  “Are you hurt anywhere besides your lips and that scratch?”

  Lance nodded, looking distracted. “My ass burns. I think they were slapping me or something, only I blacked out. I’d do that when my stepfather started in. Sometimes the first slug and I was out cold.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly, yet it wrenched my heart. I knew it wasn’t the physical pain that made him faint, however. I’d seen him bloody his knuckles when a wrench slipped and he caught his hand between it and a plow blade. He’d curse and throw the wrench, and suck on his knuckles, but he wouldn’t faint. I think when violence is directed at him, he’s stunned into unconsciousness, like a hammer blow to his brain. Kind of self-preservation.

  So at night, when he’s sleeping, and he gives voice to the pain and hurt of his life, I hold him until his breathing is regular, his voice quiet.

  “We need to get home,” I said. “We need to find out who did this. I think I already know who might have started it.”

  ***

  The dance was still going on when we left. It was around eleven-thirty. Tomorrow would be Saturday, for which I was relieved. We were waiting on Trujillo to come by with his combine to harvest the grain, but
I doubted it would be this weekend, and I was relieved about that, too. Lance needed a chance to relax after tonight. I doubted, however, that he would ever feel quite as safe at school as he might have away from his stepfather—already beat on by thugs just a few months after running away from home. I swore to myself this would be the last time in his life.

  As we drove the fifty miles home from Animas to the farm, Lance lay against my chest under my arm. Occasionally, as we climbed a hill or turned a curve in the road, I had to take my arm from around him and shift up or down. But we were used to this accommodation by now, and it was almost unconscious on our parts.

  The hum of the motor and the whine of the tires on the pavement, the gentle swaying of the pickup as we traveled over the highway, the warmth of Lance against me—all these sensations were familiar, comforting, but my mind snagged on how quickly that could change.

  When I’d found Lance with his clothing ripped and his pants shoved down around his calves, I was afraid he’d been raped, but he’d said his attackers had tried to rape him. There was a difference—a big one—and I wanted to hope that, out of a night of such violation against him, he had been lucky and escaped such humiliation. “And you’re sure they didn’t…you know…do things to you?”

  He laughed at that. “Angel, I think I would know if someone had done that!”

  In the dark, it was hard to tell if his face matched the laugh in his voice. I didn’t think so and pulled him tightly against me.

  A moment later, he was crying quietly.

  “Can you talk about it?”

  He sniffled and put an arm around my chest. “I was on my way to the locker room after the game ended. I told your mom and Trinket I’d be riding home with you, so I came down off the bleachers on the north side. People in the crowd were so angry, I heard them cursing the quarterback for not throwing you passes. But I also heard people talking about you and me. Anyway, I got to the bottom and the crowd forced me toward the north entrance, where the girls’ locker room and showers are.”

  Lance sat up out of my arms and I glanced at him. His hair was disheveled. He was staring out the front of the cab at the black and silver of the desert night.

  “Someone mentioned me, the ‘orphan kid,’ and I just kept walking, not thinking too much about that, but as I got close to the locker room, someone grabbed me from behind, and before I knew it, they’d shoved me through the door.”

  When he turned to look at me and his eyes caught the dash lights, I saw they were pooled with tears. “I thought I saw Casey and Dick behind me, just before that, but it wasn’t their voices in the locker room. I tried several times to break free, but someone was squeezing my elbows together behind my back. When I tried to scream for help, someone covered my mouth with his hand, and when I bit down on his fingers, that’s when I got hit in the mouth.”

  “And you didn’t faint right then?”

  Lance leaned back into the seat. “I’m a lot stronger than I was when we first met,” he said, his voice sounding defiant. “I tried to fight back, Will. I knew they weren’t going to just let me go.”

  We were nearing the turn off to the town of Playas. Every time I passed this way, my blood boiled at Lance’s parents, but especially his stepfather. The road cut off to the right, toward the south, a darkly glimmering strip of asphalt in the night, and up on the side of the hill where the new town of Playas lay, just a few lights were still lit this late. A moment later, we passed a hill and the town disappeared. From there it was a straight stretch of highway, east into Hachita.

  “You didn’t see either Dick or Casey after that?”

  Again, Lance just shook his head. “Once we were in the locker room, all I could hear were the guys who’d forced me to go with them. ‘Let’s cornhole this fucker!’ one of them said, and they all laughed. ‘No, let’s make a woman out of him for Barnett.’”

  At that, my heart almost stopped, recalling the cut on his ball sac. Calves that have been castrated aren’t considered male, and the ranch and farm way of life around here influences the way guys think of themselves—as bulls and stallions. They decided they needed to do something to him. One of us had to be a ‘woman’ to make things right in their twisted minds.

  It struck me that Casey must have been in the locker room and saw something that scared him into going for help. If he had seen the flash of a knife blade and guessed what one of them planned to do, that would account for why he looked so frightened. Was Lance passed out by then? Had they already started ripping his clothes off? Had Casey seen one of them take out a knife? When I got there, Lance was by himself, so something must have happened to scare his attackers off. I couldn’t imagine what, and so I knew I had to make Casey tell me what he knew.

  “What’s the last thing you remember, then?” I asked Lance. I pulled him back down to my chest. I couldn’t stand how small and vulnerable he looked over in the seat by himself.

  “One of them hitting me with something on the ass. It hurt, Will, and that’s when I went nuts, trying to get loose, and someone grabbed my balls and squeezed so hard it was like being kicked in slow motion, and that’s the last thing I remember.”

  “Did you see any of their faces? Or get an idea how many there were?”

  He shook his head against my chest.

  * * *

  When we got home, I was bone tired and angry, and Lance was jumpy and jittery, and when we sat down at the kitchen table for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, he wouldn’t look me in the eye. It must’ve been after midnight and Mama and Trinket were probably asleep, so I tried to be quiet as I opened the refrigerator for the milk carton. Lance dabbed the peanut butter on a piece of bread, followed by a generous dollop of strawberry jam, as red as his bruised lips. I set the milk on the table, then leaned down behind him and wrapped my arms around him, kissing the top of his head.

  “What else is bothering you?”

  “Nothing. I’m just scared and mad.” He bit into the sandwich, and jam oozed down the right side of his mouth, shiny under the kitchen light. I leaned over and licked it off his chin. Then I kneeled to his side and made him look me in the eyes.

  The violet was gone, partly because of the glare of light above us, partly because of his emotional state. “You look sad, too.”

  He took another bite of his sandwich, wolfing it down, and drank milk out of the carton. He handed it to me and I did the same. He watched me, still looking sad. “If I had been raped, Will…would you still…love me?”

  “Of course I would! How can you even ask such a thing?”

  “I needed to know. I know you didn’t like hearing about the other men I’ve been with.”

  I kissed him on the lips, trying to be careful of where it was split, and I tasted the sweet of the jam and the warmth of the peanut butter, the salt of the blood. “They don’t matter. You do. I’m always going to be with you!” Then it struck me. “You were raped, Lance. Maybe not physically, but you were raped tonight and it’s my fault.”

  “Why do you say that? How can it be your fault?”

  “Because we’ve been so up front with Mama, so lax with the family. People found out about us because of Rick, you know. I should have kept our secret from Rita and Trinket.”

  “How, Angel? I’d be down the hall, and you’d have to sneak in and out of my bed.”

  He was smiling a little now, and that made me smile, too. “I snuck into Uncle Sean’s window one night and slept in his bed, so I could have done the same thing with you.”

  Lance shook his head. “Rita would still know, Will. She’s smart. I’ll just bet if we knew the truth, she’s figured out about May, too.”

  Later, I had to get another look at the cut I’d seen, but I still didn’t want to alarm Lance—or let him know it looked like a knife cut. I didn’t even want to think someone was actually intent on castrating him. So when we had brushed our teeth and were back in our room, naked, I left the light on and laid him on the bed; I kissed him on the stomach then slid farther dow
n, kissing and inspecting him, saying, “Nope, nobody bruised you here…” Kiss. “…or here…” I moved farther down until I was at eye-level with his balls. I glanced up at his face. He was sprawled out, arms flung above his head, eyes closed, enjoying my kisses.

  He had an erection, and I caressed it, then cupping his balls in my hands, I lifted them with my eyes inches from the cut. He moaned softly, so I studied the wound. Sure enough, it was a straight, thin line, and I almost cried out in anger. Instead, I gently licked the wound and was glad he didn’t say it hurt. He just moaned with pleasure.

  Still later, when we were lying skin to skin, both with stiff-ons, I said, “you’re really not too hurt?”

  He kissed me on the mouth. “I will be if you don’t make love to me.”

  I felt my little buddy throb at that. We were both emotionally strung out and clung to each other with the same desperation our love had always brought on. Lance had been abused all his life, had been forced at the hands of his stepfather and, tonight, at the hands of strangers, to submit his body. Even in our own love-making he always took me inside him, making me—for all the stupid guys who can’t imagine otherwise—the man, making him the woman. I’d never thought about it like that, but that’s how his attackers thought of him. Now he was wrapped in my arms, the smaller of the two of us, and I felt his warmth as he snuggled into my chest. It wouldn’t be long before we made love. We couldn’t lie next to each other in bed for long without making love. And when he sat up to get a little glycerin and rosewater on his fingers, I caught his hand in the dark. “Tonight,” I said, lying back and pulling him on top of me, “I want you inside me.”

  He gasped. “Really? I…I’ve never done that.” His voice was a whisper, with a slight, deep-throated quality. “Are you sure?”

  I kissed him in response. “Umhmm. I want to feel you inside me. I want my man to make love to me.”