Guardians of Time

by Zimbell House Publishing

  “I think so, but I’m not sure.” She dug her feet in and leaned into him as he lifted her to a standing position.

  “That’s right. We’re going to walk to my vehicle now. Tell me if you have trouble or need to rest for a while.”

  The two hobbled down through the brush to the turnout in the road. Guardian helped Roxy into his car. He debated using his flashing light and decided against it.

  “I’m going to take you to a medical facility. Is that all right?”

  “I guess so ... as long as my parents don’t find out.”

  “Your parents are frantic to find you. That’s one reason I’m here.”

  Roxy was rubbing her hands over the heat vent on the dash. She began to sob quietly. “Maybe you should just drop me off at the shelter.”

  “I’ve got to have you checked out medically before I lose you. You know the rules.”

  “I hate the rules. They’ll check me out at the shelter.”

  Guardian shrugged and began to drive in a direction that would reach either destination easily. “Can you tell me where the others are now?”

  “Candy was going to the bridge by the train station. Susan was going to the Grange. I don’t know about the others.”

  “I dropped Candy at the shelter just before I received word about you. She is doing fine. I haven’t heard from Susan’s people yet.”

  “She’s in a bad way. She was saying crazy things like she didn’t want to live anymore.”

  “When you say she was going to the Grange, what do you mean? Don’t keep mum about this. It may mean her life or death.”

  “It’s simple. She found a hidey-hole under the back of the building. She crawls in there when she feels depressed.”

  “I’m going to swing by the Grange to check whether she is in her hidey-hole. Will you be okay with that?”

  “It’s all right. I’m feeling okay now. I hope we can help Susan.”

  Guardian broke a cardinal rule to rescue two girls at the same time. Normally, he would have secured one before he went to save the other. He turned his flashing light on and vectored straight for the large white building on the main street just out of town.

  “Show me where Susan likes to hide.”

  Roxy took Guardian to the small opening under the back steps of the rear entrance to the Grange. She called out, “Susan, are you in there? It’s Roxy. Guardian is with me. Please say something.”

  “Roxy, go away and take Guardian with you. I don’t need help. I’m not going home.”

  Guardian signaled to Roxy to keep silent. “Susan, this is Guardian. I found Roxy on Arlo Hill. She is okay. Don’t blame her for ratting out your special place. The information will be safe with me. If you need me for any reason, you know how to reach me. Say that you understand.”

  Susan said, “I understand. Now go away ... both of you.”

  Guardian and Roxy returned to the car and sped to the Emergent Care facility.

  “I’m going to stay with you until you are medically cleared. Then I’ll take you to the shelter or to your home ... your choice.”

  Roxy was silent.

  Guardian worked with the emergency medical staff, who checked the girl out behind a curtain. She was proclaimed fit within a few minutes. Guardian took her to the shelter where the duty staff signed a paper of admission. Then Guardian was off to cover other assignments while Roxy settled down in a bare room with a bed, a bureau, a sink, and a toilet. Roxy felt like she could relax for the first time since she ran away from home after dinner that night.

  For the rest of the night, Roxy tossed and turned on the bed, glad to have a warm place with a blanket. She wondered about her friends’ welfare. Candy was here somewhere. Maybe Susan would see the light and call for a rescue too.

  Roxy thought about Guardian. She had known him for over two years but had no idea who the blond, handsome man worked for. He had materialized in her life when she first faced the great darkness, the void of death. All she recalled of that horrid night was his radiant face, surrounded by an aureole of light, looking down at her. She was convinced he had saved her life. She told him that he must be her guardian angel, and he had adopted the name as if he owned it.

  “Call me Guardian,” he had told her.

  Since then, she had learned that Guardian was not just her rescuer, but ministered to a round dozen girls of her age. She knew most of those fellow misfits personally from school or from her extracurricular activities. They thought of themselves as “The Dirty Dozen.” They were the bane of law enforcers and the terrors within their families. A game they all enjoyed was a form of “Dare You,” whereby they courted disaster when they felt blue, and they trusted Guardian to be present when they were in dire distress.

  The girls had a special way to contact Guardian by cell phone. They would leave a brief message on Guardian’s voicemail asking for a rescue. He would respond, asking for their condition and location. Then he would find them and make things whole somehow.

  Roxy was not the only one who thought she loved Guardian. Like the others, she had tried to contact him when she was not in danger, but he would never answer. It was as if he was hiding in the blackness inert and waiting to be summoned for an emergency. For Roxy, the man was a genuine superhero, but with limitations that made him real.

  Nancy was one of the examples of Guardian’s limitations. She had become pregnant and used a coat hanger to try to abort the fetus. Guardian could find her, but he could not save her or her baby. When Roxy asked him about that, he claimed he was not allowed to discuss private matters. That gave him cred, but it did not satisfy her curiosity.

  Gwendolyn was another example of her hero’s limitations. She had gone searching for her lost dog in the dead of winter. She found the dog stuck in the ice of the lake, and she called Guardian but did not wait for him. Instead, she tried to edge out onto the ice and fell through. Guardian retrieved both her and her dog, but the hypothermia was too advanced to save either victim. Roxy thought Gwen had been dumb not to wait, but she understood the girl’s love for her dog. In her place, Roxy might have done the same thing—and encountered the same fate.

  Now Roxy thought about the numerous successful rescues Guardian had been responsible for. Never once had the young man taken advantage of any girl under his charge. He never asked for a reward. Although he communicated with someone who directed him from on high, he never spoke a word of criticism for his bosses. Roxy surmised that the Guardian was not the only one of his kind and that all the rescuers were directed by some being with significant power.

  The girl dreamed of a celestial hierarchy, with a chain of communication leading ultimately to God. However, she did not—could not—believe in God, at least not in the traditional ways. When she talked with her contemporaries, they understood the special relationship each had with Guardian. They would not speak to the secrets they shared with him, and he did not betray their secrets to the others. Young women’s secrets were, for him, inviolate and subject to a seal of silence. Was the man a priest? She did not know, and she did not want to know. It was enough that when she made contact, she could depend on his being there for her.

  Roxy remembered her mother’s threats to tell her father what a bad little girl she had been. On those days, she would stand at the door so she could see her father before her witch of a mother got to him. She would weep as she anticipated her spanking, hopping from foot to foot and peeing in her pants and on the floor. He would pick her up and hug her. Then her mother would come up and tell on her. Off he would take her to his study and tell her how disappointed he was to know she was being contrary to her mother. Over his knee she would go, and he would spank her hard on her bare bottom. She once saw her mother in the doorway, smiling and nodding as Roxy shrieked and begged him to stop. Her hatred of her mother began in earnest.

  She was not the only object of beatings in her house. Once her father had taken off his belt to go after her big brother. She had tried to grab away the belt, pleading that he not b
eat her brother again. He used the belt just once on her behind, and at once, she knew the sharp pain her brother must feel many times in a beating. She had hidden under her bed and held her hands over her ears while the belt fell on her brother’s bare behind again and again.

  Her mother was not immune to the violence, but it took a different form. When her father was upset with her mother—and this was seldom—he would haul her off to the bathroom and tell her to strip down to her nakedness. He would loosen his belt and drop his trousers and boxers to rape her from behind as she whimpered and sometimes screamed. Roxy knew this because one time, she had hidden in the cabinet under the sink during one of these episodes. She was appalled at what was happening to her mother, but she could not help but feel a certain satisfaction that the witch had her reckoning.

  Roxy liked to sneak out into the night and make out with the neighborhood studs. She went as far as she could while retaining her virginity. One night after her all-night encounter with a local tomcat, she came home to find her mother ready to take her to their family physician. Her mother demanded that the doctor give her daughter a virginity test immediately and stood witness to the whole procedure. Roxy watched her wicked mother’s expression as the doctor looked between her legs while her heels were in the stirrups. She felt the tongue depressor on her labia as the doctor told her mother her hymen was fully intact—she was still a virgin. Her mother was mortified. Vindicated by a medical professional, Roxy now saw her way clear to do whatever she liked since she knew her mother would not have the courage to take her through such an examination a second time.

  Roxy lost her virginity at the earliest opportunity after her medical test. Harry Aplomb took her behind the school building between bells, and he bragged to everyone he could find that he had been the first to fuck Roxanne, the prettiest girl in his class. As he had no proof, everyone laughed at his boast in disbelief. Roxy, in revenge for his tattling, paid the strongest tough in the school ten dollars to beat him to a pulp. Harry was never so aplomb after that beating.

  She was not just a beauty, but sharp as a whip and literary. She kept a diary in a code of her own devising and recorded everything that happened in her day with acerbic commentary. She was a born satirist who targeted everyone she met. Her poems and stories made their way into her school’s literary magazine. People hated what she wrote. Her set of twelve applauded her audacity. They, too, were savage critics of hypocrisy. They used cryptic nicknames to describe the foolish and the dumb. However, writing was not Roxy’s only refuge. She had her episodes of escape and transformation. Her parents became terrified at what she might do next. Her brother, who loved her dearly, was apoplectic whenever she had gone missing.

  Water always fascinated the girl. She swam early and often. A natural at diving and aquatics, she would take every opportunity to expand her horizons. She swam not just in pools but in rivers and lakes. She often went to the sea to go beyond the surf line and do strokes far out from the shore. Old quarries were a source of delight as she plunged to the depths of them to retrieve the detritus and junk of ages past. One of her rescues was at midnight at the limestone quarry near her town. By chance, she had left a message on Guardian’s voicemail about where she would be diving. Guardian had checked his voicemail recordings just in time.

  Roxy liked to run with the wolves, as the faster boys were known. She made sure her suitors used condoms, but she was aware she might be vulnerable to STDs despite her precautions. As she had prevailed on her family doctor to prescribe birth control pills, she did not worry about getting pregnant. Her only concern was that her doctor might tell her parents that she was on the pill. She had no objection to pills, and she managed to scrounge a baggie of blue pills, which she administered to her suitors to keep them active for the hours it took to bring her satisfaction. She was voracious and insatiable generally.

  Drugs outside the sexual arena were not Roxy’s thing, though her mother had begun to take opioids in overdose measures. The witch seemed to have required her own form of escape, but she had no Guardian to see her through her crises. Roxy witnessed her psychotic mother descend into a string of mental conditions, leading eventually to institutionalization. Her father gradually lost all interest in his wife, but he did not seek solace from his children, whom his spouse had alienated permanently.

  Roxy had been at a school party where people had used drugs from cocaine to opium to fentanyl. Many of those students had been hospitalized and were in critical condition. An investigation ensued, and many arrests were made. Roxy and her eleven friends were not implicated. In fact, they were held up as examples of how to say no. Roxy laughed with the boys she fucked, saying that there was no better drug than safe sex. She never had to be rescued from sexual assault. In fact, she doubted Guardian had any idea of what a termagant she liked to be in heterosexual sex.

  It was not because of a lack of opportunity that Roxy eschewed lesbians. She avoided having sex with women because she hated her mother and never wanted to get close to any creature who had the potential for her mother’s perfidy and cruelty. As for being a man-eater, as some proclaimed, she rationalized her inexhaustible sex drive to a female’s need to collect sperm to prolong humanity. She never connected her sex acts as derived from or directed to her father. In fact, her last physical encounter with her father involved her problem of understanding why she had to perform well in calculus.

  She had brought home a report card with only one grade below an A. For calculus, she had received a C. Her father had taken her to his study and told her to take down her panties and pull up her skirt. She was then to lean over his desk. He took off his belt and beat her with it until she cried. He told her to pull up her panties and pull down her skirt. She could not look him in the eyes.

  “Do you know why you were beaten on your bare behind?”

  “I’m not sure why.”

  “Maybe you should take down your panties again. I’ll use my belt until you understand why you are being beaten.”

  As she did when she was a little girl, she hopped from one foot to the other. “You beat me because of my math score, which was only average.”

  He looped his belt through his pants and nodded. “If you require a tutor to help with your calculus, I’ll pay for it along with any transportation you need. You will never again come home with a C in math. You will thank me for being strict in this matter later. Now, get your homework done and come down for dinner as if this never happened.”

  Roxy had been reminded of what it was like to be punished like her brother. Her backside was red and streaked. It hurt to sit down. It hurt even when she applied an ointment. It did not stop hurting until Sammy Daniels had fucked her silly after taking one of her blue pills. She had used her heels to dig into his ass as he humped her repeatedly. He had no idea what she was running from, but he saw his chance for glory and seized it.

  The morning after her exploit with Sammy, Roxy came to breakfast as if nothing exceptional had happened. She had the name of a math tutor Sammy had given her, and she demanded that her father buy her a car for transportation. That was how Roxy obtained her Corvette, which she remembered as having been earned by her father’s severe beating. Her brother had observed that he should be so lucky. She grimaced at him and shook her head in dismay.

  Roxy’s grades were never again a problem. Still, her depressions became increasingly acute. She tried to use sex to dispel her blues, but the vigorous laving did not have the desired effect. For a while, she would feel exhilarated. Then she would despair and brood despondently. Her father mentioned her mother’s being on lithium, and Roxy worried that she might be hereditarily inclined to follow the same path as her mother. When she broached this idea with Guardian, but he told her the conditions were likely a combination of heredity and environment. As she had not told her guardian angel about her sexual history or her having been abused, she could not disagree.

  Roxy was in a dream state as she reviewed her brief life. She recalled each of her token lo
vers and the good times, the bad times, and the evil times. She thought about being a student in a public school where corporal punishment was permitted. She had been beaten in front of her English class for having committed a grammatical blunder. She was swatted on her backside by a smiling virago wielding a board with a handle. In retrospect, she thought the woman was a lot like her mother. When she presented the proof that her grammatical usage was, indeed, correct, the teacher beat her again with the board. When she went to the assistant principal to review the case, the woman asked her to take down her pants and panties and lean over the desk. Public school was an unmitigated disaster. When she arrived home, her mother was waiting with a switch. Roxy found herself beaten at school and at home. She vowed to have her revenge in an escape.

  Meanwhile, she passed the time by going beyond her homework and her writing to prepare for college. She began to wonder how long Guardian would remain responsive to her asides. Driven to exist on three or four hours of sleep each day, the young woman tested herself every day. How much could she memorize in a given interval? How long would she retain what she had learned? Could she solve problems that were deemed unsolvable? How many skills that were gender-identified with males could she master?

  By then, Roxy’s mother was a shell of a person. She could not recognize her husband or her children. She had received a frontal lobotomy. Sitting in a wheelchair by a glass window all day, she watched the shadows change as the sun rose and set on the institutional grounds where she stayed. Having attempted suicide on numerous occasions, she was watched on a twenty-four-hour basis by burly orderlies who seemed like statues in a cemetery tableau. Roxy did not want to end up like her mother. For that matter, there was no one she wanted to be like. Increasingly, she ran from her deep deliberations. Guardian remained with her and her friends. Because of him, they kept alive and together.

  Facing college, the twelve freaky friends were anxious. They had counted on each other for so long, they feared the diaspora from each other. They speculated on how Guardian could possibly continue as he had done.