by Phoef Sutton
“So, I said take her out on the boat. I thought she’d remember the boat or the feeling of sailing, at least. Maybe that would help. It didn’t. She still didn’t know who we were. She was alone out there on the sea with these strangers. Terrified. I tried to talk to her like I always did, to remind her of things. She didn’t know me. Finally I got angry and I went below, just for a few minutes, just to cool off. When I came back she was gone. Just gone. We looked, we searched but…it was as if she’d never been there.”
Carl felt a little deflated.
“So it was an accident.”
Frank set his beer down on the table. “No. How do you think an able bodied woman falls off a sail boat in the middle of a calm sea?”
“So what are you saying?”
He looked around the room, irritated, like someone who is asked to explain a joke. “She was trying to escape…from us.”
Carl still wasn’t satisfied.
“Was your brother with you when you went below?”
“No, he was reading on the bow.”
“Did you see him?”
“No.”
“So he could have left, gone up on deck, and…”
“And thrown her in? Yes. I’ve thought of that. I like that better than her killing herself to get away from me.”
“But you don’t believe it?”
He shook his head, sadly. “Why would he do it?”
“Did he know you and Jesse were lovers?”
Frank laughed. “Well, I’ve never met you and you know, so I suppose it’s a fair bet that he knew. Yes, he knew. And he was very understanding, very noble about it. My brother’s very understanding and noble about most things.”
“But you don’t think, out of jealousy…”
“No, not jealousy. You have to care to be jealous.”
“But what kind of life did he have ahead of him, tied to her?”
“Yes, that’s better. Killing for convenience.”
“Do you think he might have?”
Frank met his eyes. “Well, it’s better than the truth. Why do you care so much?”
“Because it doesn’t add up. Trying to escape? Where to? I don’t care how disoriented he was, she knows where she is at any given moment, she’s not going to jump into open…”
Frank cut him off with sudden intensity. “How do you know how she is?”
There were a lot of questions Carl might have asked himself before he spoke. He asked none of them. “She’s alive,” he said.
FOURTEEN
When she opened her eyes a bright light flooded in, spreading from below all around her. She sat up and looked at her strange surroundings in confusion. A bare concrete ceiling encrusted with dust only a few feet above her head. Metal supports branching from it to the floor just beneath her. She shifted and felt a splinter in her leg. She was on a rough plywood platform that stretched forward all the way to the source of the light– a long slit in the floor that was so blazingly bright she could hardly look at it.
Then she realized that it wasn’t the floor beneath her at all, it was the ceiling. She laughed at her own confusion. She was up in the ceiling above the auditorium, of course. But why the hell had she been sleeping up here? Hell of a place for a nap, she thought with a laugh. Then she stopped and grabbed the railing a little tighter. What if she’d rolled over in her sleep? Everyone does that. She was always rolling over on her cat in bed. What if she’d rolled over and right off this board in her sleep, waking up in mid air, wondering why she was falling, too late to do anything? God, that would have been horrible.
But it hadn’t happened, she told herself, climbing to her feet. She was okay and she’d never be stupid enough to nap here again, that was for sure. Once she made it to the lights she’d know what was going on. Someone was obviously working on the stage or the lights wouldn’t be on. It would be Floyd or Mr. Ellison or Carl and once she saw them she’d remember why the hell she’d come up here. Hell, she’d probably just dozed off for a second, not long enough to do any fatal rolling.
At the thought of Carl she felt a little guilty again. She really should tell him, she really had to. It wasn’t like it was something that was going to go away. Could that be why she was here? Was she planning to meet him here for a private talk? They’d come here once before she remembered with a grin. During lunch they’d sneaked through the trap door and made love right there, right in school, with everyone all around them and no one suspecting. Except maybe Annie, she’d seen them sneak out afterward and rolled her eyes, but in a nice way. She’d liked the idea. Annie was a romantic too.
She made it to the lights. The catwalk here was much broader, the railing was made of metal and she felt perfectly safe now. This was her turf. She crouched next to the lights – they were blazing with heat and she had to squint to keep them from blinding her, even though they were pointing away from her, down onto the stage. She might have called out now, but she waited for her eyes to adjust, so she could see who was down there and know whose name to call.
The pain in her eyes eased. She was a good thirty feet up, so it took her a moment to spot them; two figures on the sofa, center stage. She didn’t know them and at first she thought they were working on a scene. Then she realized they were fucking.
She didn’t say anything – if it was her down there she wouldn’t want to be interrupted. But she didn’t turn away either. She didn’t mean to watch, it was just that she’d never seen anyone doing this before. It certainly wasn’t a turn on, in fact the whole thing looked so absurd she couldn’t believe it felt as good as it did. But maybe it wasn’t feeling so good for them – that couldn’t be how she and Carl looked when they did it.
She started to turn away, wondering how long she was going to have to wait up here for them to be through, when she heard a sound and then she knew she and Carl had never looked like that. She heard the girl crying.
She turned to look again. She could hear the girl whimpering. She’d pulled away and was curled up at one end of the sofa. Jesse didn’t recognize either of them. What the hell were these strangers doing in the auditorium?
“I can’t,” the girl said. The acoustics of the theater were such that Jesse could hear her perfectly.
“Sure, you can. You can do anything.” The guy had a confident tone, a fatherly tone. He bent over to kiss her and Jesse could see that he wasn’t a student. He was a man, at least twenty years older than the girl. Jesse felt sick.
“No, it hurts.”
“Come on, it always hurts at first. It’ll feel good, trust me.”
“But it doesn’t, you said that and it doesn’t. I just can’t relax. I gotta go.”
She started to stand up and he took her hand. Jesse could tell the girl was surprised by how tight he was holding it.
“You can’t leave me like this,” he said. “Not when you’re the one who brought me here. Think about the risks I’ve been taking.”
She started crying now, really crying. “I’m sorry, Ted, but I can’t. I gotta go home.”
He stood up, holding on to her arms. Not that she was going to run, not that she had the strength to run. “You can’t leave a man like this. You have to learn that.”
“But I really don’t think I should do this. I changed my mind.”
“How can you do that? Don’t you even care about me?”
She sat down again, her face in her hands. The man walked around her and started rubbing her shoulders. “You know I’d let you go if you really wanted to. But I don’t think you do. I don’t think you’re that selfish.”
The girl laid her head back on the sofa and wiped her eyes and nose. She looked over at him and Jesse didn’t think she’d ever seen a face that looked that young.
“Isn’t there…something else I could do?”
The man laughed and sat on the back of the sofa. “What did you have in mind?”
She didn’t laugh. “I don’t know. I don’t know how.”
He slid down next to her and took her he
ad in his hands. “I’ll teach you. Will you let me teach you?”
“Yes,” she answered with a lifeless voice.
There are some things you can’t see when you’re in the middle of them, Jesse thought. There are some things you can only see thirty feet up, leaning over a tungsten lamp.
He was pulling the girl’s head toward his lap when Jesse kicked a lamp with a loud rattle and yelled out, “Get your hands off her, you pervert!”
They both jumped and tried to cover themselves – the man pulling his pants up, the girl trying to climb into the sofa. Jesse might have laughed if she hadn’t been so angry.
The girl was too scared to cry now. “Who’s there?” she asked.
“It’s not what you think,” the man said and Jesse did have to laugh, wondering what the hell else it could be.
“Put your dick back in your pants and leave that kid alone.”
The girl started crying again – Jesse was starting to find it annoying.
“Girl, get your clothes on and get out of here.”
The man had his pants zipped up and was recovering his dignity. He squinted up into the glare of the lights, trying to catch a glimpse of his discoverer.
“Who are you? What are you doing up there? This is a county building.”
Jesse laughed again, amazed at his gall. If she hadn’t been thirty feet up and hidden from sight she might have found him intimidating.
The girl had gathered her clothes up and was stumbling for the fire exit. The man followed her.
“I can’t let you go like this, let me take you home.”
“Leave her alone, Ted,” Jesse said, in her sternest voice.
“Will you shut up?” he said. “Can’t you see you’re upsetting her?”
“I’m okay, really,” the girl said. She tried to pull herself together and Jesse was getting downright pissed at her, because she knew the girl was doing it for his sake.
“I’m upsetting her? What the fuck were you doing?” Jesse called out.
The man walked back center stage and looked up at the lights; he wasn’t squinting now. “Now you come down here and you leave quietly and I promise you I won’t call the police.”
“The police? Go ahead, how does the phrase statutory rape grab you? How about a few years in prison, pervert?”
The girl turned her head into one of the curtains. Jesse wondered when the fuck she was going to put her clothes on.
“You don’t know us. You have no right to try to turn this into something ugly.” He was defiant now, glorying in his argument. Jesse wished she could spit far enough to reach him. She could imagine how scary a man like that could be if you were close to him, if you thought he knew best. Thank God she was far enough away to feel like God.
“Well, it looked real pretty from here. What are you her uncle?”
“I’m a teacher at this school and I have a right to be here, the question is who the hell are you?”
“A teacher! Oh, this is great, Mr. Doran’s going to love that.”
“Who is Mr. Doran?”
Jesse laughed again. “The principal, and you’d know that if you were really a teacher. Now you leave her alone and get the hell out of here…” The sentence dwindled off because she suddenly realized she was getting to a ‘before I’ do something, and she had no idea what she could do.
He looked up at her for a long while. He seemed to know where she was now and to stare straight at her. They both seemed to be having the same thought at the same time: She was up there, and there was no way down that wasn’t past him.
He was very calm when he spoke. “Young lady, are you going to come down or am I going to have to come up and get you?”
FIFTEEN
He spent a long time waiting for an answer. He thought he heard a movement up there, but it was so far away it was hard to tell. He kept searching his memory, trying to place that voice, but nothing came to him.
There was no ladder, no scaffolding for her to have climbed. That meant she must have used that old passageway inside the lighting booth. No one had been allowed up there in all Ryan’s time at the school. Years ago, students had actually been permitted to climb around in there, until a boy had fallen through the ceiling and hit the linoleum floor thirty feet below. Since then the place had been locked up – lighting adjustments were made by the custodial staff on the scaffolding. He’d barely glanced at the trapdoor himself.
Still, he’d heard rumors of students doing exploring when no one was watching, using it as a hiding place for pot smoking and God knew what all. Sometimes he’d find the trapdoor unlocked, but he never investigated; he didn’t think it was his place to patrol the insides of the building. He had more important jobs to do.
So this was one of those wild students, probably stoned silly, trying to scare him. Well, she’d succeeded. But why couldn’t he place the voice?
He turned back to Jenny and helped her get dressed. She was still crying and she was no help at all, limp in all the wrong places.
“What are we going to do?” Jenny asked.
“I got this buttoned wrong, will you help?”
“What are we going to do? Mom’s not going to find out, is she?”
He pulled her behind the black curtain and grabbed her arms, tightly. “Listen stupid, your mother’s not the problem. This is serious, stop acting like a kid.”
She wiped her eyes and tried to stand up straighter. “I’m sorry. Could they really send you to jail?”
“I think so.”
“Oh, God I’m so sorry.”
He held her and stroked her hair. “That’s okay, it’ll work out. But you’re gonna owe me a good one.” He laughed.
“Yeah, whatever you say.” She tried to laugh too.
“Now you can’t go home.”
She winced. “Oh, God.”
“Now you gotta stand by me. We just have to talk to her. I’m sure this kid doesn’t want to hurt anybody.”
She nodded quickly and silently.
“Good girl. Now you just back me up.”
A loud rattling sound split the silence of the stage. Ryan and Jenny ran to the lighting cage – the trapdoor was shaking. Ryan knelt down next to it, shifting a large metal shelf filled with lighting gels to have more room.
“It’s locked,” he spoke to the girl behind the door, calmly, helpfully.
The rattling stopped.
“I have the key. And I’ll let you out if you promise not to make any trouble.”
“Please,” Jenny added.
A voice came from behind the door. “So you can go out and fuck some more little girls? How many have you fucked so far?”
Jenny was at the door to the cage, she turned away at that.
“My name is Ted, and this is Jenny. What’s your name?” His voice was pure friendship and reason.
There was a pause. “Jessica.”
“How old are you Jessica?”
“Eighteen. A little over the hill for you, I guess.”
“Well, are you a little girl? I don’t think so. You know as well as I do that high school kids today aren’t children. Hell, they’re more mature than most of the teachers. Wouldn’t you say?”
She didn’t answer.
He went on. “Now Jenny and I feel for each other very deeply. I know it’s unconventional, but I respect her and I think she’s old enough to make her own decisions. So you have a decision to make and I want you to think about it, because, if you wanted to, you could wreck my career, send me to jail, ruin my life and Jenny’s too. And why? Because we were trying to find a little happiness. Is that what you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” there was a mocking edge to the voice that he was starting to hate, “but I don’t think she wanted to fuck you and I know she didn’t want to suck your dick.”
He slammed on the door with his fist. “Don’t talk like that in front of her, you bitch!”
The voice didn’t stop. “Well, Jenny, did you want to fuck him? Did you?”
He turned to Jenny. She was outside the cage now, staring through the chicken wire. “Well,” she said, “I really care for him…”
Ryan was at her in a second. “You don’t have to justify yourself to that…” He faced the door again. “We don’t have to justify anything. I can call the cops and have you arrested for trespassing and it’ll be your word against ours. No matter what you say, Jenny will not turn on me.”
“Maybe not, but I bet she’s a lousy liar.”
Ryan leaned against the door of the cage and looked back at Jenny. Does she look like a good liar, he asked himself. “Get out of here,” he whispered.
“I want to help.”
“Get out of here.”
She called out to the hated trapdoor, “I did want to fuck him.”
Ryan grabbed her arm and shoved her toward the door. “Shut up! Haven’t you done enough damage already? Now, get the fuck out of here.”
She was out the door, but she stood there in the parking lot hesitating stupidly. “When will I see you?”
He slammed the door on her without answering. He hurried into his office and opened his filing cabinet. He pulled out a little plastic baggie filled with pot and a small film container filled with amphetamines. He ran into the boy’s room across the hall from the auditorium and flushed them down the toilet. He sat on the lavatory floor with his head in his hands, feeling like he was trying to shove his brain back in place.
For the last two years he’d been walking a crazy tightrope, doing stupid, self-destructive things. He’d been miserably unhappy, stuck in a foolish marriage and a dead end job. So he’d flirted with danger in the most obvious ways. Doing drugs on the job, with his students – though that had seemed only fair since they were supplying this drugs. Fooling around with under aged girls, four of them by now, daring the world to catch him.