The Incident

by Andrew Neiderman

  ‘Why did you quit midway?’ she asked. ‘Couldn’t you work and attend the classes?’

  He looked as if she had struck some sore spot.

  ‘There were pressures. As I told you, my father was going into a big expansion. He was going to hire someone else to manage the service department. To my parents, I suppose it looked like I was flailing about, purposeless. I mean, education wasn’t purposeless, but without a definite goal …’

  ‘Well, if you’re happy about it, then you made the right decision.’

  His smile widened, deepened. It was as though he finally had relaxed, felt relieved. ‘I was right about you,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you’d have a way of making me feel right about myself.’

  He brought his wine glass to his lips quickly, as quickly as someone who might want to stop himself from saying another word.

  He just doesn’t want to imply that someone as wounded as I was could do something like that for him, for anyone, she thought.

  What else could it be?

  THREE

  When they arrived in the village that night, Tommy and Wayne realized that they were out of beer. That seemed to be the most important thing in their lives at that moment. In fact, Victoria thought they actually sounded a little hysterical about it. She had been hoping they would volunteer to drive her home and not just into the village, but as soon as they turned on to Main Street, Tommy moaned, ‘We’re out!’ He held up an empty beer bottle and burped.

  ‘No way. We were robbed back there,’ Wayne said. ‘I hate those guys from Frishman’s bungalow colony. They never buy anything.’

  ‘Kayfield’s is the only place selling it here now,’ Tommy said mournfully.

  ‘Shit. I ain’t going home to get my father’s stuff.’

  She was following their conversation, but it all seemed surreal. She suddenly realized why they were upset. Neither of them was eighteen and could walk into a bar or store and buy a beer. Was Wayne even driving legally? You could drive at night at seventeen if you had passed driver’s education. She didn’t want to ask, but she doubted he had.

  ‘There’s Jack Morris,’ Wayne said, nodding ahead. ‘He’s eighteen. We’ll give him a few bucks to buy us six.’

  They pulled to the curb. More kids had ended up in Sandburg as the evening had worn on. She saw some who she knew came from South Fallsburgh, Woodbourne and Hurleyville. Apparently, this weekend Sandburg was the hamlet to go to. Small crowds hovered around benches and the fronts of both George’s and Fein’s drugstore, which had closed. Only dim front window lights were on.

  She glanced in the rearview mirror. Behind them, in front of Kayfield’s, Mike Siegler, the township policeman who had Sandburg as his beat, was leaning against his patrol car and talking with some men who were all watching the gathering of teenagers with a disapproving eye, just waiting for some traffic or other violation serious enough to enforce. Checking on the ages of anyone seen drinking beer or horsing around wasn’t worth the effort and might create more havoc than there already was. Some storeowner most likely would be the one to get into real trouble for selling it in the first place. The leniency seemed all right. After all, some businesses were making money, and these were the days and nights they had to do it. But Wayne and Tommy weren’t going to chance it, especially since the only place open for beer was the bar and grill where the town cop hung out.

  Wayne and Tommy seemed to forget her. They leaped out of the truck to head for Jack Morris. She stepped out slowly. She hadn’t had the time or room in the truck cab to get her blouse and shorts over her bathing suit and now did it as quickly as she could. It felt funny dressing in the street. She would remember thinking that a number of the boys had been watching her, but rattling off their names later was not easy. Anyway, she couldn’t be sure who was really looking at her and who was just looking in her direction.

  She turned and walked slowly toward the alleyway between Kayfield’s and Trustman’s. A large gray cat leaped out of an opened garbage can as she approached and scurried through the opening in the foundation of Kayfield’s building. She hesitated, deciding whether to take the alley and the shortcut or go up the street, perhaps being noticed by someone she knew who was driving in her direction. They might give her a lift, but it was already ten thirty. She would have to move quickly to be sure she was home before eleven. Her parents could be home already. Her mother didn’t like lingering at dinner parties once everyone was searching for something new or interesting to say, and when everyone obviously had had more than enough to drink.

  She couldn’t take the chance. The shortcut was the fastest way.

  The night sky had grown quite overcast and there hadn’t been any moonlight. Her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. She had traveled this shortcut so often that she thought she could do it blindfolded anyway. Nevertheless, she stumbled over a tree root and nearly fell forward. She felt as if she might have twisted her ankle a little in the effort to stay upright, so she slowed a bit.

  Behind her, the din of car horns, conversations and laughter began to dwindle. After a while, silence came rushing in like water breaking through walls on both sides. She could hear herself breathing hard. Her skin, cooled by her swim in the lake, was now dry and feeling itchy. Regret and then suddenly an inexplicable fear began to travel up her body like spiders. It was as if she had stepped into some pool of dark remorse and was sinking. She sped up, jogging now, chased by the image of her parents’ faces when she came bursting into the house, hot, sweaty and panicky.

  She felt a twinge in her right side, just below her ribs, and slowed up. At one point, she stopped and listened. Something was moving on her right. She strained to see into the shadows and make sense of the silhouetted shapes. The sounds disappeared. She began to walk fast and then faster. Just before she reached the Millers’ house, she sensed something or someone behind her. She paused to turn and that was when it happened.

  What she would later describe as some sort of sack was dropped over her head. At the same time, a rope shaped as a lasso fell along with it and was tightened quickly just under her breasts so that her arms were driven hard and snuggly against her sides. She screamed, but something else was wrapped around her face so firmly that it pressed the sack into her mouth. She gagged and choked, and then felt herself being dropped to the ground on her back.

  There were no voices. It seemed like a ghost was doing this to her. She squirmed and kicked and froze in shock when she realized her Bermuda shorts were being unfastened and the bottom of her two-piece was being taken off her along with it. They were down to her knees and then with a powerful quick motion were brought to her ankles and completely off.

  She was in a mad frenzy, squirming and kicking. Strong hands on her shoulders kept her from sitting up.

  Those powerful hands left her shoulders but seized her ankles and pulled her legs up and then outward to the point that she feared they’d be ripped off. She thought she was being murdered. The concept of being raped just wouldn’t take the lead position in her stream of thoughts. She was fighting it back, but once she felt the hard, erect penis pressing into her, she sensed she was losing consciousness. She recalled thinking that it was better to let it happen. It was like being anesthetized for an operation. She didn’t fight it. Her body collapsed seemingly into itself and all went black.

  She emerged out of the darkness, gasping for air and in a sea of pain.

  Every part of her body that had been subdued was screaming. Even her face and her mouth ached. The stinging in her groin and the insides of her thighs felt as if dozens of bees had attacked her. Her first moans were so low that she didn’t think she had actually made a sound. Then her moans grew louder and louder, each one so deep and resonant that they sounded more like noises being made by some wounded wild beast. Gradually, she reached a higher pitch and the moans became shrill screams.

  Warren Miller had fallen asleep watching television. He was in his big cushioned easy chair with i
ts back to the opened living-room window. He woke with a start. His wife, Rose, had already gone to bed as usual, leaving him watching television and knowing he would fall asleep and then wake up to go to bed. It was a ritual especially followed on weekends. They did little else. Only sixty-two, he had retired from his job as a Centerville feed mill truck driver on a disability pension because his rheumatoid arthritis had not only crippled his fingers but turned his back into a furnace the moment he strained to lift anything.

  At first, when he heard the scream, he thought it had come from something on television, but there was a news program on and the commentator had moved to the weather report.

  He sat up and listened harder. Then he turned to the window. Someone was screaming.

  ‘What the hell …’

  He rose slowly, walked through the short entryway and opened the backdoor. They had a small porch on the rear of the house built to provide for the four steps leading to the entrance. The floorboards squeaked and strained. Replacing them had been on his to-do list too long and now he was past being able to do it himself. He paused and listened. The screams were getting lower. Someone was straining to cry out. He went back into the house and found his flashlight in the kitchen drawer and then returned to the porch. At first he heard nothing and was about to conclude that it was probably some of those kids who were wild on weekends in the summer. Then he heard another scream and another and stepped off the porch.

  Mumbling under his breath with threats if this turned out to be some prank, he made his way through a patch of birch trees and passed the wild blueberry bushes Rose harvested for her homemade jams. Their two boys, Rube, twenty-eight, and Jesse, twenty-four, had been out of the house almost the day they each graduated high school. Rube had, for reasons Warren still couldn’t fathom, enlisted in the Coast Guard and was stationed in Rhode Island. He had never mentioned any interest in it until the last weeks or so of his senior year. Jesse got his high school girlfriend, Mary Williams, pregnant, married her and went to work for his father-in-law, who owned a lumber company in Hurleyville. Mary was already pregnant with their second child. Both he and Rose decided that Jesse had fallen into a good thing. He wasn’t much of a student, but he was a hard worker.

  One thing was sure: neither Jesse nor Rube would be out here tonight, drinking too much and raising hell, Warren thought as he paused again to listen. They had brought their kids up right. When he heard nothing, he concluded that it was over, that whoever was pulling the prank had moved on. He was about to turn to go back when he heard a distinct moan and some sobs. Now preparing himself for something possibly very serious, he cut through another patch of birch and waved his flashlight at the shadows from side to side as if he was trying to paint a wall of light in the darkness.

  He lowered the beam.

  The moment he saw her, he froze. She was sprawled on her right side, her naked ass and legs smudged with dirt. Her right arm was twisted back, her hand under her thigh and her left arm was extended, her hand grasping at the air. She looked as if she was trying to stand. He rushed forward.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded, as if there was a group of teenagers and not just this half-naked girl squirming on the ground.

  She screamed in response and he felt his heart stop and start. Then he knelt down slowly and carefully turned her body. The moment he touched her, she screamed again and again and again. Her eyes were closed. She looked like someone having a horrible nightmare. He gazed at her naked lower body and saw the blood on her thighs.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he cried. ‘Don’t move. I’ll be right back.’

  He turned and, despite the clawing pain in his lower back and behind his legs, he ran through the woods and to his back door.

  ‘Rose!’ he shouted the moment he entered. ‘Come down! Hurry!’

  He went to the phone in the living room and, before he dialed, shouted for her again.

  ‘Get me the police,’ he told the operator. ‘Emergency.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Rose cried from the stairway.

  ‘Girl … in the back … in the woods … raped, I think,’ he said and shouted into the phone as soon as the dispatcher answered the call. He rattled off the little detail he knew, identified himself and where he was, and then told Rose to get a blanket. ‘Hurry,’ he told the dispatcher. ‘She’s hurt bad.’

  The dispatcher said she would call an ambulance and a patrol car would be there as soon as possible. She repeated the information he had given her as if she had to be sure she was the one not dreaming. Rose, in her bathrobe and slippers, appeared holding the blanket.

  ‘What is it, Warren?’ she asked when he hung up. ‘What are you saying?’ She was still dazed from being woken out of a deep sleep. Her thin gray strands of hair looked as if they were trying to flee her scalp. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ she demanded. He was standing there, looking as if he had lost his senses.

  ‘What? I told you. There’s a girl back there, half naked, bleeding and maybe beaten to within an inch of her life. I’ll take this to her.’ He seized the blanket, gazed around madly for a moment and then brightened with a thought. ‘I’ll take another flashlight,’ he said, handing the blanket back to his wife and rushing into his garage to get a bigger flashlight. He returned quickly, scooped the blanket out of Rose’s hands again and told her to wait for the police and the ambulance and then direct them to the light in the woods.

  ‘Who is she?’ Rose asked as he headed for the rear door again.

  He paused. ‘I don’t know. I really didn’t look at her face,’ he said. ‘Maybe some city girl.’

  Not realizing the cruelty of what she was saying, Rose replied, ‘I hope so.’

  He rushed out.

  In the village, Mike Siegler, through his opened car window, heard the call coming in. Todd Berns and Randy Carr stepped back as Mike got into the car to listen to the dispatcher.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ he said. The two men with whom he had been chatting leaned in as he started the engine.

  ‘What was that?’ Todd asked.

  ‘Young girl, attacked, maybe raped behind the Millers’ house,’ he said and hit his lights and siren as he turned the car around and shot off. Everyone in the street stopped talking. Laughter dribbled into silence. Only the jukebox music was heard. The moment held and then shrugs and laughter brought the festive night back to center stage.

  Down at the fire house, three of the volunteer ambulance squad were playing gin rummy with Howard Gerson, the fire department chief. Howard was sixty and a lifelong resident. The fire department had been his whole life since his wife had passed away two years ago from the same esophageal cancer that had killed Humphrey Bogart. Attaching it to a celebrity gave it more meaning, for some reason. He practically lived in the firehouse now. All three of his children had moved away years ago.

  When the phone on the wall rang, the four looked at it as if no one had known it was there. Howard rose quickly to answer. Charlie Morris, Jack’s father, Carl Nichols and Pete Carnesi all waited, paused, their cards fanned in their hands. In the rather dim light of the firehouse, they looked as if they were painted on a sixteenth-century canvas, the colors around them fading, their eyes soaked in surprise. All three were in the mid-forties and, like most locals, lifelong friends. The chief hung up quickly and turned to them.

  ‘Fire up Florence Nightingale,’ he ordered, using their nickname for the ambulance. ‘Girl was attacked in the woods behind the Millers’ house. Siegler’s on his way, as are the state police.’

  ‘Attacked?’ Charlie said, rising. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘Rape. What else?’ Carl said.

  ‘Who?’ Pete asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Howard said. He hurried to his car while the three ambulance volunteers slipped into their outfits quickly. Pete started the ambulance and, when the garage door opened, he hit the siren. Howard Gerson was already on the street, his tires squealing as he made the turn. Lights in houses along the way c
ame on as the sirens woke the inhabitants. The hamlet was exploding with curiosity and concern. Some of the people living in these homes had heard too many sirens. They were refugees from the Second World War in Europe and the nightmares they had buried years ago rose like locusts eager to feast on their faith in this new world.

  Victoria never heard the sirens and never heard the men rushing to her side. She felt herself being gently lifted, but she refused to open her eyes or speak. She was waiting for the morning light to confirm it had all been a nightmare, but that didn’t come. Men were talking to her, trying to get her to tell them what had happened to her. She sensed her blood pressure was being taken. Cool antiseptic wipes were being used to clean up her face. Someone was saying, ‘You’re going to be all right. Don’t worry.’

  She felt herself falling back into the darkness. When she opened her eyes at the sense of being moved again, she saw the lights of the hospital emergency room entrance. Two nurses were rushing to the gurney and escorting Carl and Pete as they rolled her through the entrance and down a short hallway to an examination room where a young intern named Dr Friedman took over and had her placed carefully on the examination table. The ambulance volunteers stood in the doorway for a moment, all three of them with the same expression of pity and disgust. One of the nurses said something to them and they walked off.

  The other nurse was cleaning her legs. ‘Oh, my God,’ she chanted.

  Victoria felt her remaining clothes being stripped off as the full examination began. She remembered thinking she had been separated from her body and was off to the side, indifferent to whatever they were doing.

  What seemed like hours later, she was still in the examination room, staring up at the sterile white ceiling. The pain throughout her body had receded like the tide. Whatever they had given her really had her floating. She heard the sound of her mother’s voice and then her father’s, but she didn’t turn to look.