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A small stealthful figure moved in the darkness outside the west wing of the orphanage. It was very dark and the wind blew its cold breath against Buddy’s face. He had a flashlight but he would save that for later…for now he would scamper along the field between the west wing to the service road, and from there he would make it across the playground, crossing the very spot where the tunnel had collapsed on him. A spot that had now become a level playing field of green grass and a memory of a peaceful male figure who had come to Buddy in the darkness of the collapsed tunnel.
From the edge of the play-grounds it was a quarter of a mile to the end of the orphanage property and the fence at Grand Avenue. It was another three miles down the narrow and treacherous lane to U.S. Highway 60, which afforded a wide shoulder for the pedestrian…although it too was treacherous for the foot weary.
There was no city bus service at this hour…nobody comes or goes from the boon-docks before or after dark…no one except kids that are running away.
At the edge of the field and the fence to freedom…Buddy turned to look back at the orphanage. All the lights were on… and it looked like some vast planet…a way station out in the middle of the galaxy…inside aliens of the Asylum were assembled for dinner…talking, joking but not missing Buddy Quinn…except for Joe Tough who now appeared coming up through the fields… the blackness of Tough embracing the blackness of the night.
“What are you doing here Joe?”
“I going with you.”
“No Joe, you can’t go with me.”
“Why not?”
“Joe…you are a big black man…I am a little white kid…don’t you think that would look out of place?”
“No, I your friend and I go with you to help you find your mother…and then we come back to Father Hermann.”
“Joe, you just have to try to understand that I have a chance alone but with you, the first thing someone would do is call the cops.”
“Maybe not…maybe the first thing they do is hurt Buddy…maybe they kill you.”
“Why would they do something like that to a kid?”
“Because they are able to Buddy…Father Hermann tell me many stories of sick people who do things to children…to their privates…they hateful people Buddy…they act like they good people but they mean and they hurt you.”
“Well if you are trying to scare me… you have!”
“No, if you go, I go with you… to help you…nobody hurt Buddy if Joe Tough there.”
“Ok Joe but we really got to move…we stay off the road when a car comes…I think we can walk three miles an hour…I have a watch, we’ll time it to the end of Grand Avenue. I think it will take us about ten hours walking straight down U.S. Highway 60, which is the way Father Hermann always drives.
They walked to the end of Grand Avenue…thank goodness there were no cars and they were able to make good time walking on the highway. It only took forty-five minutes but Buddy knew that he could not keep up with the longer striding Joe Tough, nor with this pace.
“Joe, I can’t keep up…you’ll have to slow down.”
“When Buddy gets too tired, I carry you…you very light…you rest on my back.”
They walked for a while quietly as the moon made its way through the night clouds and lit the path before them…a good thing for walking but a bad thing for others to be able to see the two of them from a distance.
An old red pick-up truck pulled up alongside the pair… who were trying to hide in the gully beside the road.
“Saw you two walking and figured you needed a ride.” A toothless red-neck peered out the truck window.
“Where you going with that black?”
“We going to town.” Buddy said.
“So we, get in…we’ll give you a ride…but the black will have to get in the back.”
“Joe looked at Buddy and shook his head, no!”
“Come on Joe, get in the back…they’d probably tell the first cop they saw that we were out here.”
“No Buddy.” Joe whispered, “These bad for you.”
But Buddy was already in the cab, before Joe could stop him and the truck was pulling away from the shoulder. Joe got his foot on the running board and then threw his leg over the bed of the truck. The truck had a small window and Joe took a position near it where he was able to watch Buddy and, most of all the toothless man next to him.
The two men were drinking beer, smoking and listening to the radio, which blared into the night the chilling message that Buddy was not going to be alright.
It didn’t take long for the men to show the evil they had in mind…the toothless one began to feel Buddy’s leg and run his hand into his crouch. Buddy winced at the pain as the man grabbed his small testicles.
“Stop…you’re hurting me…” Buddy yelled out in pain.
Joe Tough glanced inside, the driver was enjoying the activity…Joe noticed that he was traveling at 55 miles per hour…a dangerous speed to try anything…but Joe knew that the red-neck wasn’t going to stop hurting Buddy…that was what he had intended to do all the time. Now he was taking Buddy’s pants down and jerking off his underwear…Buddy was as naked as a featherless chicken…as the dirty toothless man fondled his limp penis.
“Lookie here at this little flower.” The vulgar man said
“Ain’t enough there for a snack.”
“Well you know what they say about caviar…you know them black eggs?”
Now Buddy was crying and kicking at the red-neck…but he was locked between the two big men and had no chance of freeing himself…suddenly there was a massive black arm in the passenger side door…grabbing the throat of the red-neck like a vice. The man struggled…Buddy somehow got free and drove his fist into the red-necks crouch…Buddy’s aim was on target and the man squealed like a stuck pig…. “OIIIIIIII!”
The driver was now in a rage…the truck swerved across the road into the oncoming lane and then back into his lane…the motion caused Joe to lose his balance and he fell into the bed, banging his head on the side of the bed. The fall caused him to lose his grip as well on the red-neck who was coughing and holding his privates.
“You little bastard…you ought not done that to me…” he grabbed at Buddy who continued to kick at him…but Buddy was no match for his size and rage…he grabbed Buddy’s privates and squeezed. Buddy was in agony as the man pushed his small scrotum into his body…he screamed for all he was worth.
The truck driver made another quick, sharp turn of the wheel to keep Joe off-balance and then he braked to a sudden stop and jumped from the truck with a baseball bat in his hand. Joe was down in the bed of the truck as the bat hit him on his outstretched arm…the bat hit Joe several times…in the head, on his back, on his arms and hand but in a quick movement Joe had the bat in his big hand and wrenched it from the driver and in another movement Joe had the bat and he was coming down on the driver’s head with full force. The man did not see or feel what happened next…his head popped like a melon and blood flew over the truck.
Joe Tough was bleeding from his head and mouth…but he was able to get his knee into the cab…he gabbed for Buddy and pulled him outside with Buddy’s help. Joe Tough was in a rage…he grabbed at the red-neck, who averted Tough’s big hand, and from the opposite side of the truck, he kicked Tough very hard causing him to fall back from the door of the truck. The red-neck moved into the driver’s position, under the wheel and gunned the truck into the gully and then back on the shoulder, and in a moment he was gone…leaving his companion along the darkened highway.
In a matter of moments Joe Tough’s worst nightmare had come to fruition…not only had Buddy Quinn been molested before his eyes but a man had been mortally wounded by his hand. Joe Tough was bewildered…his normal reactive function slow…he now thought and moved like a snail…his big heart had been opened but now his mind was blank. He could not begin to comprehend the danger, that lie ahead for him…but Buddy had some sense of it.
/> Buddy grabbed at Joe Tough…“We got to get out of here Joe!”
“No…I don’t want to go.”
“But Joe, the cops will be here soon.”
“No, we stay to help this man…”
Buddy looked at the man…he was staring at him…his eyes were cold and fixed.
“Joe, I think this man is dead!”
“Yes…and you don’t got any pants or underwear on.”
Buddy had somehow forgotten in the melee…his clothes were in the truck…he stood in the cold of the night, naked from the waist down.
Joe Tough took the coat off the man on the ground…he handed it to Buddy.
“Cover yourself Buddy…we find you some clothes soon.”
“Joe, you just don’t understand we have got to get out of here.”
“Where do we go now Buddy?”
Buddy thought for a long moment. He knew they could not go forward, the cops would be coming from St. Mark and Nashville…there was only one thing to do…try to go back to the orphanage…and hope to get back in before bed check.
“All right Joe…we have to go back…as fast as we can…and I think you should run on ahead and get back to your apartment…get to safety Joe…get all that blood washed off…go on Joe…please hurry…I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Joe Tough began to speak…he pointed to the man on the ground…that he had killed…beat to death with a bat…but he just could not bring himself to think in this moment he had only to trust his friend Buddy and so he ran…he ran as hard as he could back toward Grand Avenue…back toward St. Joseph and the safety of his small apartment. In the night he felt the cold wind against his perspiration soaked shirt…he tasted the blood in his mouth where the bat had smashed it…and the blood streaming down his face from the gash over his eye…and he tasted the salt from the tears that ran down his black face.
Buddy ran behind Joe Tough, urging him along as he fell further and further behind…his one step to Joe’s six soon put a major distance between them…and then Joe Tough was gone into the night…Buddy slowed to a walk and glanced back toward the city…red and blue light flashed behind him.
Buddy picked up his pace and soon he was at Grand Avenue turning left he ran until his side hurt so bad he could hardly breath…he walked for a time, bent at the waist and when the pain had subsided he began to run again. He thought he would never see or be glad to see the huge building…the orphanage appeared before him…he climbed the fence and lay in the grass for a moment…he took out the flashlight and looked at his watch. It was eight forty-five…he had fifteen minutes until there was a roll call…he didn’t think he could possibly make it. But he ran as hard as possible and began to formulate a plan to get back into the west wing and into the dorm without being detected by Sister Louis Ann.
The back door was open…Buddy climbed the stairs to the third floor…he tried the door to the dorm and it was locked…‘damn,’ he thought, what a time to get caught with his pants down!
He could fake it and stay out here on the landing…pretending to have been locked out…but that didn’t solve the problem of having no underwear or pants. Buddy lay near the door and listened to the chatter in the dorm…suddenly he heard Bobby Joe Ratterman…whose bed was the last in the row…if only he could get his attention…
“Bobby Joe!” Buddy half yelled.
“What.” Was the reply.
“Please let me in…” Buddy prayed.
Ratterman opened the door to the stairs and Buddy slipped into the dorm.
“Thanks, Ratterman…I’ll explain tomorrow…but for now could you go to my locker and get my PJ’s?”
“What is the number?”
“10.”
Ratterman was off in a flash…and in only moments he returned to see that Buddy had no clothes on below the waist.
“Man…you are strange, you some kinda queer?”
“It isn’t what you might think Bobby Joe…I can explain, but just not tonight.”
“What are you two boys doing back there.”
“Just talking, Sister.”
“Buddy Quinn…you get over to your bed and get ready for the rosary.”
Alphabetically…Buddy’s bed was just two away from Ratterman’s…someone was watching out for Buddy tonight…and for that he would be happy to pray the rosary…for himself and his friend Joe Tough.
After the rosary, Buddy slipped into the bed beneath the safety of the covers. He thought of the night, how frightened he had been when the red-neck began to fondle him and then he remembered how Joe Tough had tried to choke the man. He remembered how the driver had tried to shake Joe loose from the bed of the truck and then there was a blur until Joe was back in the cab trying to free him from the grasp of the wild man who had tried to rape Buddy.
Buddy wished that Joe had killed him as well…but he also knew that his friend Joe Tough was now in serious trouble because of his selfishness. If Joe was in trouble, so too was he and that was the way it had to be…Joe had saved his life…and now Tough's life hung in the balance.
Historical Reference
Until the end of the Cold War in 1990, the countries we think of as Central Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary), had hardly seemed a part of the contemporary continent. They stood beyond the Iron Curtain as if bewitched by the spell of Stalinism, and looked for their economic, cultural and military support not to their old partners in the European tradition, but to the mostly Asiatic Soviet Union, with which they all share a common frontier to the east. Yet all three are partners in Europe’s Christian heritage and are linked by innumerable strands of history with the nation-States to the west.
In 1938 the Prime Minister of Great Britain, excusing his countries reluctance to go to Czechoslovakia’s defense, described it as ‘a far-away country that we know little of’. Nevertheless, these countries have never been beyond the concerns of Europe, and in particular the concerns of the German speaking nations, with which all three have common frontiers to the west. Almost land-locked (Poland has a sea coast, on the Baltic) with Russia on one flank, Germany on the other, they have been battlegrounds throughout their histories and have been plagued by all the old European problems of minorities and disputed boundaries.
Ethnically mixed, they are nevertheless among the most strongly nationalist countries of the continent. The Poles look back to centuries of tragic defiance, as their country has been divided, enlarged or diminished at the will of stronger Powers. Hillarie Belloc, once called Poland, ‘the hope of the half-defeated’. Hungary remembers the days when it was an equal partner in the Austro-Hungarian Pact, and still further back to its own preeminence under the Magyar kings of the Middle Ages. Czechoslovakia has been a State only since 1918, when it was created out of the fragmented Habsburg Empire, and is still divided between the predominately urbanized Czechs and the chiefly rural Slovaks, but its loyalties are centered on the magnificent and historic city of Prague, one of the most beautiful in all of Europe and in itself an exhibition of European civilization.
A range of mountains dominates Czechoslovakia, but Poland and Hungary are mostly flat, allowing the easy entry of armies. Here successive waves of invaders from the east have reached the limits of their expansion. Mongols, Soviet Communist, Muslims…and here, before the Second World War, lived the world’s greatest population of Jews, most of them murdered by fellow-Europeans in the concentration camps of Nazi-occupied Poland.
For the most part the people of these countries have always lived austerely, there is coal in Poland and bauxite in Hungary, but traditionally there have been agricultural lands with a labor force of peasantry. Only in the west of Czechoslovakia, Old Bohemia and Moravia, is there an old-established industrial base. And even now, when the whole area has been homogenized by nearly half a century of communism, the gilded cities of the old regimes contrast piquantly with the poor villages of the countryside. Yet these are States of consequence, strong in their own loyalties, and forming a kind of buffer, extending north and south ac
ross much of Europe, between the venerable and elaborate cultures of the west and Asia’s ever-threatening influence.
Through the Khyber Pass and into Gdansk marched William the Conqueror, Attila the Hun and other assorted despots, murders and the communist…intent on the taking of life from this Polish shipyard. But in the twentieth century, this town of individually styled gables of five-story houses with the look of the Dutch countryside stood resolute against the advance of the communist. In this shipyard community, the trade union Solidarity, caught the world’s attention as it fought for freedoms under Poland’s communist rule. After more than a decade of struggle, its leader, Lech Walesa, became the country’s president, leaving the yard to get on with the business of making and repairing ships, an industry that has been carried on here for at least 700 years.
Perhaps the most beautiful city in Europe is located at Prague, Czechoslovakia. Charles Bridge is Prague’s most delightful artery. Designed by a 27-year-old architect, Peter Parlet of Grund, in the fourteenth century, this 1980-foot-long (603 meters) bridge no longer carries traffic but is open to the public. The bridge contains 30 statues, standing guard over the old town on the near bank of the Vltava River, the bridge leads across the river to Mala Strana, the old noble quarter, and the city’s castle.
Hungarian kings were not born royal, they had to be elected, like presidents. Matthias Corvinus was elected in 1458 and ruled for 32 years, during which time he founded a university and an observatory, encouraged the arts, built up a large library, and extended and decorated St. Matthias Church in Budapest. The church was the coronation church of the Hungarian kings and contains a treasury of Hungarian history.
The British royal family may not recognize it, but Hluboka Castle in southern Bohemia, Czechoslovakia is a replica of Windsor Castle. The castle was founded in the thirteenth century; it resides in a magnificent park setting above the Vltava River.
And for sheer beauty and pampering of the soul there is Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia…the place where Europe’s Rich and royal used to come for their curative baths. Of course they have moved on to some newer, bigger, better, more expensive place of the rich and famous but for my money this is still the place. Karlovy Vary in Bohemia, better known as Carlsbad grew prosperous on its thermal springs after the main one was discovered in the fourteenth century. Charles IV was said to have been led to it by a deer while out hunting, the spa has twelve springs which are still in use for cures and treatments, although the scaffolding on some of the buildings hints at the cost of maintaining the resort’s rich architectural legacy is stunning and old world charm abounds in the decadence of yesteryears.
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