The Illusionist

by Dinitia Smith

  “If you don’t report this,” she says, “they’re gonna do it to someone else. Sure as I’m standing here.”

  “I don’t care. He’s gonna fuckin’ kill me.”

  Just then, there’s a knock on the outside wall and the curtains part. Why, it’s fuckin’ Officers Jubey and Payette! Hideous Jubey, round-shouldered, buck-toothed. Squatty little Payette with her bright orange hair.

  “Get them out of here!” I cry. “I’m not saying a word. Now I’m really not talkin’.”

  I see Payette look at Debbie. “She’s reporting a rape?” Payette asks.

  That gets my goat. “I’m not ‘she’!”

  “You know her?” Debbie asks.

  “We just arrested her on a stolen check charge, and for criminal impersonation,” Jubey tells Debbie. Jubey pulls his notebook from his breast pocket, moistens his lips ’cause his mouth is always open ’cause of his big teeth. “When did this happen?” he asks.

  “I’m not saying nothing. They’ll kill me.”

  “But they always say that,” says Debbie. “You got to think about the next victim. The police will protect you, won’t you, Officer?” She looks at Jubey.

  Jubey says, “If there are any threats, we can arrest—”

  “Aren’t they better off in jail than out there where they can do it again?” Debbie says.

  “I want them fuckin’ dead,” I say. And then, in spite of myself, I feel the tears welling up again, and they spill down my cheek, burning the torn skin, the place where he’s stitched the cut. And I know I don’t count for nothing and I just have to do what they say.

  Jubey flips open the cover of his notebook. “Ma’am, what is the name of the person you are accusing?”

  “I’m not ‘ma’am’! It’s fuckin’ Brian Perez and that asshole Jimmy Vladeck.”

  “Can you give us an address?” Jubey asks.

  “How should I know their address!”

  “Were there witnesses?”

  “Only fuckin’ Jimmy.”

  “Where did this alleged event take place?”

  “It isn’t ‘alleged.’ It’s real. In the back of my truck in the parking lot at the Wooden Nickel. Out on Old Twenty-Seven.”

  “Anybody drive by while you were there?”

  “Nope.”

  “About what time was this?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have a watch! I didn’t keep track of the time for God’s sake. Carl, the bartender, he saw us when he was closing up. Then, after the other two had gone, they—did it.” And suddenly I can’t even say the word, what “it” is.

  “We’ll talk to them,” Jubey says. “We’ll attempt to locate them.”

  “You got to arrest them,” says Debbie.

  Jubey looks at Debbie, hesitates. “Well, this— . . .” he begins. “We already arrested this person. She claimed she was a man. . . .” His voice dwindles like he’s afraid of the whole subject.

  “But she can still be raped,” Debbie says.

  I lift my head from the gurney. “I’m not gay! I’m not fuckin’ gay.”

  I see Jubey swallow, his big Adam’s apple rippling down his long neck, which is curved like a turkey’s. He nods in my direction. “This a man or a girl, Doc?” he asks.

  Dr. Chu clears his throat. “Well, we have no sign of a phallus or testes. The examination is consistent with a normally developed female, late adolescent, approximately twenty years old.” Pompous ass.

  Payette is still standing there like a fool, gaping at me. “We’ll attempt to locate the parties,” Jubey says, finally.

  * * *

  They’re gone. Debbie leans over close to me, and I can feel her big, soft breasts under the dark pink sweatshirt, breasts like my mother’s, against my shoulder.

  “I’m gettin’ out of here,” I tell her.

  “Doctor has to sign you out.”

  She puts her hand on my shoulder to keep me down, but I push her aside and slide down off the gurney and as I touch my bare feet to the cold linoleum floor, I hear ringing in my ears, and I have to steady myself. My clothes are draped across the chair. I start pulling my jeans on under the hospital gown.

  “Just a minute!” Debbie says, and she starts for the curtain. “Just let me get the doctor.”

  I let her go. But as soon as she’s gone, I’m out the door. And I am vanished!

  CHAPTER 22

  TERRY

  Dec. 16. I hope he burns dear god, I hope he burns. Burn burn burn suffer suffer suffer. I know that he must still love me somewhere. . . . How do I know? Because when I lay underneath him with my legs spread apart, wide as wide as angel wings I open my eyes a moment and he’s smiling pleasure I never knew anyone who liked it this much, he says, because he’s found his purpose in life. . . . And I took care of him. You’re so good, so fine, he tells me. He really loves Bobby—I wish he were mine, he says. I wish I were his dad. I supported him. She cannot support him. . . . When my head is roaring with pleasure, when it’s like I’m riding the waves of a great . . .

  —From the diary of Terry Kluge

  At Christmas, I shopped in a daze. Had to make a Christmas for the sake of Bobby and my dad. Because otherwise I’d kill myself. Bought presents for my dad to give to me and to Bobby, and for Bobby to give to him. Everything an effort, as if I had two-hundred-pound weights on my legs dragging me down.

  Christmas Day at my dad’s house, I made roast chicken, because there weren’t enough of us for a turkey. Easy, the stuffing ready-made, you just add water, chop the apples.

  After we’d eaten, we watched reruns on TV, twenty-five years of Christmas specials—the Smothers Brothers, Bing Crosby, and Ed Sullivan. Then I cleaned up the dishes.

  I wondered how many more Christmases there would be with my dad. Doctor Vakil wanted him to go down to Albany for pulmonary tests. Dr. Vakil didn’t have the right equipment in his own office, he said, but Dad kept delaying calling for the appointment. He insisted he felt fine, though his flesh hung in bluish folds from his skull, his eyes were watery, and I could hear him wheezing as he moved. That was his generation—they always felt fine. Wouldn’t go to the doctor unless they were actually dying. After New Year’s, I’d make the appointment for him myself, take a weekday off, drive him down to Albany myself. You become like a parent to your parent.

  Around five, Bobby and I left. Now, on Christmas night as we rode home, it was already dark out. So brief the day. I was going straight to bed when I got home, all that food had made me real tired. Maybe Bobby would go down early for once. I glanced at him behind me in the car, strapped in his seat belt in the back—I always sat him in the back for safety.

  He was wide awake. Sitting absolutely still, gazing out the window at the darkness of the landscape. In that temporarily lulled state that the car always put him in. Practically the only time I could hear myself think was when he was riding in the back of the car and distracted like this.

  I drove out toward West Taponac. We passed the white frame church with the wrought iron fence around it, the graveyard, the gravestones sticking out of the snow, their lettering all washed away by wind and water. The little settlement was even more melancholy in the late winter afternoon.

  And as I drove, staring out ahead through the windshield, his image seemed to be there on the glass, his boy’s figure, short-haired, pale and cold in front of me—appearing without warning as it did every day now.

  After someone dies, it’s the voice that lives forever—not even the image of the face. Eventually, that fades. But the voice you can summon in your head, it echoes throughout the skull. I could make my mother’s voice come to me by concentrating and re-creating it in my head, the soft round tones of her voice. I should try, as an exercise, to eradicate him. The only way to stop the suffering—but right now I just couldn’t. Wasn’t ready to destroy the memory of him. Still needed to see his image, to picture him with me, I was still in a fresh stage of grief.

  We were in the open countryside now, the land rising and falling
all around me, snow-covered fields glowing in the darkness. Pine trees lined the roadside, skeletons of deciduous trees. Now and then there was a house, windows dark. People away for the holidays. Scary it was so cold out there, what if the car broke down? There was no one on the road to help. I imagined the scene, mother and son found frozen to death in a snowbank, their car broken down, mother lying as if trying to protect her baby from the cold with her own body, two lost creatures alone and abandoned by the world.

  It would be cold in the house when we got home, though the embers in the woodstove sometimes stayed alight. Even before modern insulation, these houses had to stay warm somehow.

  I rounded the curve of Church Road and I glanced up automatically toward my house. I could see the faint shape of it, a blur in the dark. A light was on in the window. I didn’t remember leaving a light on. I was always careful because electric was the most expensive utility in the county.

  At Schermerhorn I made the left, past my mailbox. Here the road dipped and I drove cautiously because of the icy patches. The county didn’t plough because this was a private road and Mr. Jukowski did it for us whenever he cleared his barnyard for the milk truck.

  We climbed the hill and I could feel the engine straining. C’mon, baby, you can do it! . . . Hope this thing lasts.

  All around me, the immense, navy blue sky, the hills dipping and rising, luminous in the moonlight. Belonging to us alone.

  We came to the yard, and then I saw it. The red Dodge truck, parked in solitude. And in the window of the house, there was the yellow light.

  They always come back, I thought. They always come back. At least once.

  CHAPTER 23

  TERRY

  The front door was unlocked. Inside, the lamp by the couch was burning. But the house was silent, empty seeming, no sign of him. Bobby trailed in behind me. “Shut the door for Mommy, please.” It was cold in here, the woodstove must’ve died out.

  I walked into the bedroom. On the bed, under the comforter, was the outline of a body. In the faint light from the other room, I could see part of a face. At first, I didn’t recognize it. I could just discern one eye nearly swollen shut, the skin on the cheek blackened. Then the soft, tufty hair, the oval shape of the head, the high cheekbones, the jaw drawing to a point at the chin. “Dean.”

  He turned. I saw more clearly now in the light from the main room, the whole face swollen, a vertical black line under one of his eyes, little threads sticking out where they had stitched it up.

  “What happened?”

  He closed his eyes. “Jesus. Oh God.”

  He lifted his head, caught sight of Bobby behind me. “Hi, Bobby,” he said. Then he sank back down on the pillow and closed his eyes.

  “What happened?” I asked again.

  “I can’t talk. I’m so cold. . . .”

  “You need a doctor.”

  His voice was faint. “I saw a doctor.”

  I turned. “Bobby, honey, you go get ready for bed now.”

  “Dean?” Bobby said.

  “I know, honey. Dean. Go get undressed and put your jammies on for me, okay? Please, honey.”

  But he lingered. “I need to help Dean,” I told him. “You go get undressed for Mommy.”

  Bobby drifted back into the main room. I knelt down on my knees by the bed, afraid to sit on it for fear of jarring him and hurting him. I pushed the comforter in around the edges of his body. “You’re all cut. Please—tell me—what happened?”

  He opened his eyes. I could see them, vaguely, in the dark. “Can I stay here?” he said. “I got nowhere to go.”

  “I guess,” I said. Said it after trying to get him arrested and jailed, after wanting to kill him, wanting him dead. All it took was one small request. “Yes. You can.”

  “I’m hurtin’,” he said.

  “Oh God . . .”

  “You sure I can stay here?”

  “Yes, I told you.”

  From the other room, Bobby called out to me. “Mommy, I can’t get the snowsuit off. Mommeeeee!”

  “Let me just get him.” I hurried out of the bedroom into the main room, unzipped Bobby’s snowsuit, pulled it roughly down off his arms and legs, then removed his jeans and sweatshirt till he had on only his little Jockeys and his undershirt.

  “Go pee, honey. Quick. Go pee for Mommy.”

  I heard him tinkling in the bathroom and then he came back in. “Put these on.” I helped him into his blue feet pajamas, took him by the hand, and nearly pulled him into his little room. He lay down on his bed obediently—he always knew when I was pushed to the limit.

  “What’s wrong with Dean?” he asked.

  “Dean got hurt, honey. He’s gonna be okay.”

  “Is Dean gonna stay here?”

  “For a while. I gotta take care of him now, honey. You go to sleep, okay?”

  I turned out the light by the side of his bed.

  “I want the night light!” he cried.

  I switched on the little Mickey Mouse light in the outlet. There was a soft glow in the room. “No song tonight because Mommy’s too tired. Please be a good boy and go to sleep.”

  “What’s wrong with Dean’s face?”

  “He got hurt.”

  “Who hurt him?”

  “I don’t know. Please go to sleep for Mommy. Merry Christmas, honey. You warm enough?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You got Barney?”

  “Uh-huh.” He was holding the purple Barney in the crook of his arm. Right thumb went to the mouth, left hand twirling a lock of dark hair. A sign he was preparing for sleep.

  As I stood there, I felt the walls of the house quiver in the wind, only a thin membrane between us and the great outdoors, the wind and the cold. On the way across the main room, I opened the door to the woodstove and threw in some logs.

  Back in the bedroom, he still lay under the comforter.

  I could just see the outline of his features, his dear face. I sat down on the edge of the bed. All in one place, beneath my fingertips. I owned him now. I could hear his teeth chattering, felt his body shaking, the mattress vibrating with it.

  “I’m so c-cold,” he said. “Can you get in beside me?”

  I undressed quickly, put on the sweatpants and sweatshirt I usually slept in. “Stand up a minute,” I told him, “so I can get the covers down.” With difficulty, he sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stood up and I gripped his arm and pulled the top sheet and comforter away for him. He lay back down again, and I covered him.

  I climbed inside next to him, reached out my arms, tried to push one of them underneath his body so I could hold him, but he jumped. “Ouch!”

  “What hurts?”

  “Oh God. I want to take a bath. I gotta take a bath. I stink. I feel so dirty. I can’t sleep in these sheets like this.”

  “You don’t stink.”

  “I can smell them. . . . Can you make a bath for me?”

  “A bath?” He never took a bath, usually only a shower.

  “A shower will hurt too much,” he said.

  I climbed out of bed again; went into the bathroom and pulled aside the mildewy shower curtain. Turned on the water, rinsed the grit out of the old clawfoot tub with the palm of my hand, then filled it with hot water.

  Back in the bedroom, he had propped himself up on his elbows. He pushed his legs across the mattress painfully.

  In the full light of the main room, with a shock, I saw his face. One side green and bruised, streaked with yellow where it looked like it had been washed with Betadine. A line cut right through the flesh from his eye to his cheek. The wound was crisscrossed with black thread, the ends sticking out in a stubble.

  “Oh babeee,” I whispered. “Your face . . . Your jeans got mud on them—and blood. You can’t wear those jeans. I can give you sweatpants and a sweatshirt.”

  He hobbled into the bathroom—and shut the door behind him. Still wouldn’t let me see him.

  I listened, heard mostly silence, th
e water sloshing in the tub.

  He was in there fifteen minutes or so. When he came out again, he was carrying his clothes rolled tightly in his hand. “I need a plastic bag.” I handed him a grocery bag, and he packed the dirty clothes inside and tied the ends together.

  In the places where his face was not greenish brown and streaked with yellow, he was pale, there was a deep groove of exhaustion carved under the left eye, the one that wasn’t swollen shut.

  The woodstove was humming vigorously now, heating up the house.

  “What happened to you!”

  “They attacked me. Sexually.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Brian and Jimmy.”

  “Jesus . . .” Trying to understand. Then, I couldn’t help it, I asked. “But—what did they do? I mean—” Did they rape him? It was hard to say that word—the word was too terrible to speak out loud. “I mean—? Did they—?”

  “Tore me,” he replied.

  “Oh God.” Made me hurt down there just to think of it. I imagined his flesh flat and taut, like silk. “You gotta go to a doctor.”

  “I went to the hospital. They called in this rape crisis lady. She keeps on me till I tell the cops. They said they’d kill me if I went to the cops! Brian hates me because of Melanie.”

  I moved away from him, sat down on the couch, rubbing my face with my palms. “You nearly killed me,” I told him. “I wanted to die. You lied to me. Then you stole from me.”

  “The thing is, I had the money to give back to you. I had it in my pocket. I knew I should give it to you. But Terry, I was fuckin’ desperate.”

  “So, where’s the money?” I wanted the money returned—as a symbol. I didn’t care about the money itself.

  “They fuckin’ took it,” he said. “The cops confiscated it for evidence. They fuckin’ took all my money. They took my wallet. I was gonna give it to you, I swear.

  “I saw the paper,” he said. “That was lies. All lies. All the sex stuff.”

  But that part didn’t matter to me. Whatever he was, I accepted him. All parts of him, all his “deformities.” I didn’t care anymore what he was. Other people didn’t understand it. But I did. Anyway, it was like I was in this daze, my sole focus to be with him, as if there was no time at all, no reality—except for Bobby and Dean—and no time but those long stretched-between moments we were together.