Present Tense

by Gil Hogg

  “Anything stronger?” Chadwin asked picking up the glass of juice.

  “Nothing in the house,” I lied.

  A couple of crates of good claret and cabernet sauvignon lay in the workshop, and there was whiskey in the lounge.

  “No frills, huh? Where’s the nearest store?”

  “A short way along the road,” I lied.

  “A friendly neighbour?”

  “There are houses in the trees a few yards away,” I lied.

  “I think we’ll forgo the booze on this occasion. Is this cold chicken, or cold turkey?” Chadwin asked, with a spurt of laughter, pointing at the sandwich.

  I must have radiated a chill which killed his attempt at a joke.

  “Let’s go through to the lounge. Show me your hidey-hole,” he said.

  Chadwin took the tray and my upper arm firmly, and pushed me ahead of him. When he saw the patio overlooking the lake, he made me slide open the glass door, and shoved me through. He followed. Clouds had blotted out the sun. Lake Chateaugay was as level and grey as a slab of slate. Chadwin put the tray on a table and slid the door closed. Then he threw himself down in a deck-chair, and began to wolf the sandwich. I was imprisoned on the patio with him. The only way out, unless I threw myself into the lake, was the way we had come in. As for the lake, granite boulders protruded from the shallows twenty feet below the patio.

  “Have some,” Chadwin said, pointing to the untouched half of the sandwich.

  “I’d be sick.”

  Chadwin’s eyes flickered at me threateningly. He looked round like a dog sniffing out a new patch. He nodded in appreciation, his mouth full of food.

  “Just what Eve and I are looking for. You wouldn’t mind me as a neighbour, would you?”

  I squatted awkwardly on the edge of a chair, quickly deciding that I had to talk until I had an opportunity to escape. I seethed under Chadwin’s insults, but I stifled my feelings. If I pressed too hard now, or went to pieces, I would hasten the performance of Chadwin’s threat. I still had a hard resolve in me. I would talk, and bank on the hope, which now seemed remote, that there was at least a wafer-thin crust of mercy over Chadwin’s libidinous inferno – and I would be vigilant for a lapse in his attention.

  Chadwin wasn’t a conversationalist, but I prodded him into a rambling monologue. It seemed that he only read the financial columns, but I was at home there. He touched on the Dow, Federal Reserve policy, and Hudson’s prospects. It was incredible to me that I could be listening to this trite talk against the background of his threat. Indeed, it was hard to realise that this petty-minded man could have made such a threat. He seemed, at this moment, drably sane.

  Chadwin shied away from talk about his second wife. “Eve doesn’t understand me,” was her cliched epitaph. He begrudged his wife the fact that she was well off, and had family links with board members of Hudson. On balance, I gathered Eve was an asset like his houses, his stock portfolio, and his pension fund. He said his previous marriage had been to a stupid bitch. His kid was with his first wife. Both were a load of trouble, always milking him.

  Chadwin was not curious about me. The only subject he really warmed to, was himself. He could lick most twenty-year olds at tennis, he said. His squash was state championship standard, and he played golf on a handicap of four. He reckoned he was set fair to become CEO of Hudson before long.

  “We might even take your company over, Loren,” he added, with satisfaction.

  “It helps having a wife who owns a cut of Hudson,” I said, the words crawling irresistibly out of my mouth.

  “Are you kidding?” he replied, his pink face reddening. “I don’t need any fucking help from her!”

  There wasn’t a lot to Dwight Loughlin Chadwin II. He was a large, healthy, good-looking athlete. He had been programmed. His enjoyments appeared to be sex, sport, food and drink, and work, probably in that order. He was privileged by his education and marriage. He had social poise and confidence. All this, with an ape-like insensitivity. He was self-centred to the point of blindness, and stiflingly uninteresting. And yet, if I looked at what he had said to me, literally, since he had arrived in Cedar Falls, he was seriously unhinged. On one hand, he presented as a shallow and egotistical sensualist, on another as a misanthrope who had no regard for human feelings or the law. He plainly had no respect for women. He was the kind of man who would stand aside to let a woman pass through a doorway first, but in his lexicon, women were for sex, for looking after the house and kids, and bringing assets into the family. They weren’t people or friends, like the guys in the locker room.

  I had steered Chadwin’s talk into a safe harbour of superficial politeness, the business and sports small talk, with a glutinous overlay of sexual innuendo, which was his staple chatter. But his paltry thoughts were becoming threadbare, and the action he threatened had to follow soon. I was being impelled, powerless, toward a precipice.

  8

  I decided to try to stall Chadwin further by talking about the past. Perhaps if I needled him a little he would take time to justify himself.

  “You didn’t even get a conviction, did you? Community service. Suspended sentence. Right?”

  “Right into the big subject, hey? I cut some hedges for the Parks Department.”

  “You sure had one smart lawyer. Do you realise the harm you did to me and my sister?”

  “That’s the way it was,” Chadwin said, waving his hand as though he wasn’t the cause.

  I had a vivid memory of the snotty young college man, with his neat hair and tailor-made suit, the rising sportsman, the hero of the graduation ball, with his outriders smoothing his path, the adoring girls, the parents, the lawyers, cops and judges.

  “Just a harmless prank,” I said.

  “Hell, that was the intention. We didn’t go out looking for girls so we could hurt them. Goddam, we didn’t even go out looking for girls. We picked you up in the old Chevvy Bel-Air. You were hitching with another girl.”

  “My sister. We weren’t hitching.”

  “The Bel-Air was Duane’s. Beautiful cruiser. Looked like a damn juke box. Duane’s dead.”

  I couldn’t curb a beat of satisfaction about Duane Schultz, although the only vision I had had of him was as a wild animal. “What happened?”

  “Auto wreck. Spun his Aston Martin on Interstate 90. Got splayed by a rig. Must be five years ago. A nice guy, Duane.”

  Chadwin paused, thinking of his friend, but I was unmoved and silent.

  “We were cruising, just chilling out, we passed you two. We stopped and offered you.”

  Chadwin was more relaxed now, lying back, his jacket off, his eyes fixed on a gleaming sliver of lake lit by a ray of sun which had pierced the cloud.

  “It was Yonkers. You stopped on Clement Street. A row of factories. We were on the sidewalk. You guys hustled us into the car, right?”

  “You agreed. We didn’t beat you over the head, or push you into the car.”

  “It was Saturday. Nobody around. You stopped in the street, and both got out, and came over to us, and gave us a lot of bullshit, and shoved us into the car.”

  “Maybe,” Chadwin allowed.

  “And we said you had to let us out at the Dane Avenue Supermarket, and you agreed, but you didn’t do that.”

  “I don’t recollect,” Chadwin said, grudgingly.

  “That’s what happened.”

  “Hell, we didn’t think you were so keen to go to the supermarket or wherever.”

  “So?”

  “So we drove somewheres to neck, and I don’t recall you protesting too much.”

  “We did protest. We didn’t scream. We thought you’d pull over.”

  Chadwin gave a shrug of doubt.

  The uncertainties of that meeting were still clear to me. First, the ride with a couple of pushy young men, stylishly groomed, well spoken, the sort you’d expect would help an old man cross the road, or call the milkman sir. Then our attempts to get them to stop the car in Dane Avenue, low key to s
tart, but near hysterical as the men joked, made to pull over, and then didn’t. And then realising that the car was heading out of town, and knowing what these males had in mind, but still believing that two such apparently refined young men wouldn’t force anything.

  “You drove to Kiverton Park. A new subdivision of building lots with roads finished, but all the sites bare, except for a few trees. Deserted.”

  I could see it as starkly as yesterday. I could smell old leather seats, and the after-shave. Chadwin gave me his shiny-eyed, healthy-boy smile.

  “You told us you lived in Tarrytown.”

  “Yeah, you didn’t have to be worried about doing dirt on the daughters of friends from the Scarsdale Country Club.”

  I had mentioned where Grace and I lived in innocence, but it was received as a piece of information which set us apart. The two men batted Tarrytown back and forwards between themselves in the car with knowing winks. They had captured a couple of bimbos from Tarrytown. That was where the Greeks and Italians and Polacks who worked at the Chrysler plant at Stony Creek lived, in tenements. In their eyes, Grace and I were down-market, and likely to be less fussy about whom we screwed with. This piece of information about us gave Chadwin and Schultz confidence. They had carefree lives, and were going exciting places. Grace and I were there to help it happen.

  The men had stilled our calls to be let out of the car with hilarity, promises, and mock sincerity. It was a circus performance that left us – I keep saying us – but I mean me – just short of panic, but still with the belief that we would be released. Shultz had parked the scarlet and white monster under the trees, off the road. Grace was beside Duane in the front. I remembered that sitting in the back of the car I was thinking that we were heading into something I had only read about in the Sunday newspapers. Chadwin’s body against mine had been like an uncomfortably shaped piece of metal, except that he had a soft wet mouth, a minty breath and polished, even teeth.

  I don’t know when the point came that I realised that this wasn’t bluff by the men, and wasn’t going to stop. The leather richness of Chadwin’s jacket as he had slipped it off had stifled me. I tried to scream. Chadwin gagged me by covering my mouth with his.

  “I told you then by every signal one human being can send to another that I didn’t want you.”

  Chadwin mused, eyes on the bright distance, the edge of the dark cloud layer over the forest. “I thought you were playin’ around.”

  “And I told you and Duane about my sister, that she couldn’t speak properly, and couldn’t handle this situation.”

  “Shit, I thought that was a story.”

  The manhandling I received was an explosive fireball in my memory. Chadwin pummelled me as if I had been a cushion. He tore my clothes off. He plunged his fingers between my legs like ferocious burrowing lizards. I could hear Grace’s screams and moans, and Duane Schultze’s curses as he grappled with her.

  “You bit my tongue. You hurt me in the goddamnedist place, and I slapped you,” Chadwin protested as though he was fully justified.

  He had roared and thrown me off. His balled fist smashed the side of my nose. Another fist struck my jaw and I felt it snap like a bar of sugar candy.

  “You punched hell out of me!”

  “I lost my temper. I didn’t mean it. I don’t beat up on women.”

  “You don’t?” I said in a dead voice. “You left me with broken bones, and the marks, and the memory.”

  “Christ! If you hadn’t bitten me!”

  The car was full of wrenching sobs and masculine curses that day when the men’s excursion into pleasure was over. I was only partly conscious of what had happened to Grace, but she could put up no resistance. The car became suddenly quieter; only tortured breathing, and Grace’s keening, and Schultz telling her to shut up. He pulled out a bottle of Scotch whisky from the glove compartment. He uncorked it, had a slug, and passed the bottle to Chadwin. When Chadwin had drunk and passed the bottle back to him, Schultz grabbed a handful of Grace’s hair, forced the neck of the bottle into her mouth, and poured. She choked.

  Chadwin thought it was a joke. He snatched the bottle from Schultz and tried the same with me. I screamed with pain from my jaw. The neck of the bottle split my lips. Chadwin’s temper flared again at the resistance, and he poured whisky over my head as I sat coughing whisky and blood.

  I don’t remember pulling on my torn clothes. Schultz started up the car and drove for a few miles. Grace seemed numb. Chadwin swigged at what was left of the whisky. The men pushed us out of the car at a vacant lot between two factories near the Mill River Tollway. We collapsed on the ground, and the car blasted away, its stereo system blaring. We were sprawled in the dust, unable at first even to feel the full effect of our injuries. But the pain advanced quickly, and I realised we both needed hospital treatment urgently.

  Getting help that day was a different kind of nightmare. Nobody was about. The buildings around us were closed, empty. I had tried to stop one of the few passing cars, but they honked furiously at the dishevelled woman who waved so frantically at them, swerved, and drove on. In desperation I stepped in front of a car and held up both arms. It squealed to a halt. As soon as I came close to the driver’s window, he yelled “bitch!” and stepped on the gas.

  I knew that Grace and I looked alarming. My nose had bled, and my lips and chin were covered with blood. My blouse buttons had been ripped off. The waistband of my skirt was broken. Grace’s thin dress was torn at the neck. We probably looked like a couple of drug-crazies, rather than women in trouble. And my jaw had an aching numbness which was creeping up my face.

  We were alone in one of those places which seems ordered and benign, but is actually a desert. Beyond the vacant lot where we had been dumped, there were a number of low rise modern factories, with neat lawns and flower beds in front, empty parking lots, and wide, well-paved, deserted sidewalks. I saw a car parked by the front office of one factory, and I crossed the parking lot and the grass to get there. I knocked at the door and there was a movement behind the glass. A security guard, his belt sagging with keys, emerged.

  “Whaddya want?” he asked suspiciously.

  I couldn’t speak at first. I tried to say we’d been attacked, and wanted to report to the police and see a doctor. The words didn’t come out clearly. The guard looked down on me from the doorway. He was a rock-faced, shaven-headed man of sixty. His look said he’d seen it all. He shook his head negatively.

  “You’ve had a mite too much to drink it looks to me.”

  He didn’t believe the ragged, bloodstained, whisky-smelling girl. He pointed to the road, where the folorn figure of Grace waited.

  “Get offa the property, and get your ass someplace else!”

  I dragged the crying Grace with me along the bare sidewalks, until I found a callbox after half a mile. I made an emergency call, and we sat in the gutter and waited. In fifteen minutes a patrol cruiser arrived, with a big moustached old cop who took his time with the questions. I said we’d been taken in a car, raped, beaten up, and dumped. The cop made notes, leaning on the bonnet of the black and white, as coolly as if he was dealing with a stop light violation.

  “I think my jaw is broken,” I said.

  The cop must have seen the swelling, and the shadow of bleeding under the skin.

  “What about her?” the cop asked, pointing at Grace.

  “She can understand, but she can’t respond.”

  “You girls been drinkin’?”

  At that point I passed out, and the cop was left with a mute, and a body.

  I woke up in the emergency ward of the Hampton Hospital, screens around my bed. I could hear voices, cries of pain. My face was bandaged. A wire brace was fixed on my neck to keep my jaw in place. My mouth was burning and seemed to be full of poisonous chemicals.

  A nurse looked round the screen. “Hi there! Ready to talk to the police yet?”

  “How is my sister?” I managed to spit out.

  The nurse didn’t ans
wer. I guessed the man standing behind the nurse was a cop. He was in a grey suit, with a white shirt, and tie, and he held a notebook. He had a sceptical stare like the guard at the factory.

  “Detective Moran. I understand you say you were assaulted and raped?” he said, drawing up a chair beside the bed.

  “And my sister.”

  I told him my story haltingly.

  “The patrolman who brought you in says you’d been drinking alchoholic liquor. Is that right?”

  When I explained, he said, “I see,” as though it was a weak excuse. I pressed him about Grace, and he said she had been referred to a psychiatric ward, and hadn’t spoken.

  He talked of identification of the men, and I gave him their first names, and described the car. I was also able to give most of the numbers on the New York licence plate. I had repeated those numbers over and over, as the car moved off after dumping us.

  “We should get these men without too much trouble with the information you’ve given us, Miss Reynaud,” he said, more warmly.

  I noticed that another man had slipped through the screen and was listening. He was a contrast to Moran, a smart tan suit, an attractive smile, and a pile of longish grey hair.

  “You can leave the lady with me,” he said to Moran, taking the chair as the cop stood up. “And let me know how it goes.”

  “Call me,” Carl Moran said, walking out without a glance at me.

  “I’m Desmond Flynn,” the new man said, placing a name card on the bedside table.

  I shook my head, not understanding.

  “I’m an attorney, at your service. I have a lot of cases representing people like you. I can help you get the damages and treatment you’re entitled to.”

  He already seemed to know about the case. I answered his questions, and signed a paper giving him representation.

  “Don’t worry about a thing, my dear,” Flynn said, picking up the medical notes from the file at the end of the bed, studying them professionally, and making some notes of his own on a pad.