by Mary Karr
Maybe grown-ups know I know words like Hard-on from looking at me. “You got a smart mouth, little girl,” Mrs. Dillard back in Leechfield always said, narrowing her eyes at that pronouncement. And I said that a smart mouth was better than a dumb one anyday. Still, sometimes I think being smart just makes certain words go scooting through your head, leaving some bad-word vapor that a mean man can pick up on. In fact, maybe this man, now, who’s dragging down his zipper in slow motion, the little brass teeth unlocking before my eyes like the fangs of some sea monster, can hear that word Hard-on bouncing around inside my head. It invites him almost, draws him to me, actually draws on his dick like magnetism and makes it swell up inside the cloth of his pants.
I think of how the vampire couldn’t cross into the girl’s window unless she herself took the crucifix off that window and opened it to him, saying come on in. And still people did it, even when they didn’t mean to. They hung up those garlic ropes at bedtime. They looped the rosary around the window handles. They full well meant to shoo that evil away when it came flapping all liquid at the glass. But by the time the vampire actually floated there in the creamy moonlight, the girl in the gauzy nightdress was so awestruck by his hunger—the sheer largeness of it—that she’d unloop all the stuff she’d fixed up to stave him off. The garlic ropes slipped from the brass handles, and the windows swung wide so the curtains billowed over them as he gathered her slender self up into his cape.
This whole scene is rushing through my head when my babysitter’s zipper hits bottom. His hand fishes into that zipper and farther, into the shadow of his shorts. The seriousness of that reaching keeps me even from breathing regular. I’m also afraid to make him mad somehow, and even more afraid that any move I make or any word I speak will seem like welcome. So I sit still and pretend not to be home inside myself. I worry worry worry though about what’s about to happen.
I think of that old neighbor boy laying me down on the cement sack in the Carters’ garage, him on top of me bucking. Probably I don’t even have a cherry from that. I didn’t hear it pop inside me, because I was so busy thinking for him to hurry before I got in trouble. Whether I have a cherry or not, though, I can feel how marked I am inside for being hurt that way.
The high school girls always say in the bathroom that you can tell who’s been fucked by how she walks. Lecia told me that a slew-footed girl—one whose feet splay out—has been getting it for sure. I take comfort in that, for I have the worst pigeon toes in school. Really. Back in Leechfield, I got kicked out of the yoga class that Mother wanted me to take at the Theosophical Society. Here I got kicked out of the Antelope ballet school. No hip rotation at all, the teacher told Mother, then suggested tap dancing for me. But stumping through a tap routine is for fools. The other girls at the barre mirror looked so graceful. They bent their knees down in plié, their frail arms sweeping as they rose. They moved all together like flowers in some Disney cartoon. I knew in my heart I’d never look that way.
The man’s dick springs forward fast to get out of those tight britches. It’s red like somebody’s mad face, swollen like it hurts. The mere fact of it makes me seize up inside. The man pushes it down a little, holding it at its base so it points right at my face. I never saw a dick this big, this close. The little pee-hole surprises me, how it’s cut longways like a vent in a pie. This man’s not stroking his dick up and down, though, the way that neighbor boy did. He’s just holding it gentle, the way you’d show a kid a hamster or something. Still, every now and then his pecker seems to jump of its own accord, as if it had an idea. Inside the tent of my nightie, I have buckled up my legs and pressed my thighs together, hard. I have seamed myself shut down there. Somehow a small voice rises up from my belly and asks that dick all whispery not to hurt me.
This makes the mask of the guy’s face smile down at me, the way you’d look down from the cutting board at a dog begging scraps. He reaches his big hand out to place it on my head, cupping my skull. It’s like the gesture Jesus makes in my Bible picture, where they’ve written Suffer the little children…in the caption. But I won’t raise my eyes to see if this man is Jesus, because all the while he’s patting my head, that pecker of his is staring right at me with its slitted eye. From higher, the man’s voice very gently says that he wouldn’t hurt me for the world. No matter what. He would never, ever hurt me. We’re special friends. He loves me. This—he runs his hand up his dick so it shivers to itself—means he loves me. He points his pecker at me again.
What I wonder is not where to run or how to lunge past him. I know that’s impossible. Besides, even if I beat him scrambling downstairs to the phone, what would I say? I have a vocabulary for my own wrongness. All kids do, I think. It’s the result of being smaller than, less than, weaker than. No, I can’t get out of this by running. Instead, I wonder why somebody doesn’t appear in the doorway to lift me out of range of that big, one-eyed dick staring me down. If God made the world, the way Carlita Defoe’s catechism teacher said, then why doesn’t He send some Christian soldier rushing in with a sword unclanging from its scabbard to stab this man, or to lop this pecker off at the root? And I know Carol Sharp would say that this right here is God’s plan for me. Or it’s punishment for some badness I did—scaring Daddy off, maybe. Or not having the guts to go with him. Or weighing on Mother’s mind till she couldn’t paint a lick and flat lost her mind and set fire to the whole world.
The man’s voice goes into a scary whisper, more secret-like. It tells how I should put my lips on that dick in a special kiss. Which I do. Smooch. And that’s not so bad as you might think, if you keep your eyes closed and think of the dick as a little bald man. I should also point out that there is something deeply familiar about a hard-on, even when the fundamental feeling coursing through you is that this is wrong wrong, and you are wrong wrong for having been selected for it. Through all that wrongness shines a sense of something you know already. And the fear in your stomach—vampire fear, roller-coaster fear, pants-pissing fear—has a tickle to it like falling from up high, the bottom dropping out of yourself.
After I kiss his dick, I draw my head back, open my eyes, and see that it’s no little bald fellow at all, but really a grown man’s swollen outfit. The man’s voice floats down to me again, saying why don’t I poke my tongue out. Try to lick it like a Popsicle. And this time when my face comes closer to it, I draw in a breath and find the pecker itself doesn’t really smell bad, not like a bathroom toilet or anything. Really, it smells like fresh baked bread, all yeasty and alive. There’s a tear taking shape in the pee-hole, too.
I’m not going to hurt you, he says. Those words hang there in a cartoon balloon above my head. They are an obvious lie, given the man’s voice, which has grown an ache in itself, a pleading. Just open your mouth a little baby. I try that. The fleshy head of the pecker parts my lips, easing forward. I open my jaw a little, but am shy of it. My teeth wind up scraping the pecker, so it pulls back with a jerk. Watch your teeth baby, he says. Then he says that I need to open wide and say Ah, and at the same time try to pull my lips over my teeth. I do my best at this, and must have done okay, for he says That’s it and Yes before his breath gets ragged.
Then for no reason, his hands clap down on the back of my head. All care and gentleness go out of him. I sense that even the voice has gone out of him. Which puzzles me, for I’m doing the best I can here. I haven’t even cried boo-hoo crying, though tears are streaming down my face. But I’m not making any noise or sobbing, or calling out, so these tears seem like somebody else’s, the tears of a different girl, or a baby doll on TV. The pecker pushes forward and seems to have swollen hard as stone to fill all the space in my mouth. It rams against the back of my throat, so I can almost feel it bump deep in my skull where my old dime-sized headache had up until then almost gone out. At the same time, there’s a burning, tearing feeling in my tonsils, like the time I had strep throat. Plus the fleshy head of that pecker seems to block up my windpipe, for the air chokes off. My gag reflex kicks
in.
All this takes not more than a second. Just when I can’t stand it anymore, though, he pulls back. Which is a relief. He’s still holding my head in a clamp, but for a second the dick itself backs up from my throat a little so I can suck in a half-breath. I stop gagging then. My eyes are watering hard. Surely this is the end of it, I think, for more than this would kill a person. But no sooner has that thought scuttled through my brain than he pushes down on my head again and shoves his pecker forward again, the head of it like some soft mushroom swelling to block off the back of my throat, and I gag again.
Then, worst of all, something wet and warm spurts out of the dick itself. He’s peeing in my mouth. I’m sure of it. Back in Texas, during a Scout jamboree, a boy I knew peed in his sleeping brother’s mouth, and neither one could live it down. But this pee is thick as cream rinse and not coming in a steady stream but pumping in a slow pulse I try to back away from. All the tendons in my neck get tight while I fight to raise my head out of his lap, but his hand holds me down. The dick pushes up. Then my throat fills with a salty chemical taste like the chlorine from a pool mixed up with salt gargle.
Later, when he’s all done, he backs way off and gets gentle again. The flat of his hand rubs my back while I’m vomiting down the front of my gown. I am grateful for the warm rubbing of his hand, like whatever I did bad he’s forgiven me for. I vomit again till my stomach seizes up on its own hurt, and he’s patting on me bent over there. He’s saying I’m okay. I did good, though it’s clear down in the core of me that I’m no way okay.
That night in bed, I look at the window and wonder about Dracula taking shape on the other side of the heavy drapes, waiting to be asked in. I myself shouted down to the baby-sitter to come up to me.
After a long time, I get up and put on my school clothes. I sit dressed on the straight chair in Lecia’s room, feet not brushing the floor—sit still as a statue, the way you have to when bird-hunting, or bass-fishing with rubber worms. You let the worm drop down to the river bottom, and just scoot it through the silt every now and then. Otherwise, quiet, for you don’t want to thump around in the boat.
When the curtains get light, Mother comes in to scrub at the vomit stain on the rug. She has made a little paste with water and baking soda in a cereal bowl and is working that paste into the nap with a toothbrush. She asks me do I need to stay home again, seeing as how I earped yesterday. And I say no way. Lecia sits up in her heap of bedcovers, blinking. I’ve got my plaid satchel in my lap. I’ve matched my Ban-Lon socks and folded them to the exact right length; I’m immaculately turned out in my school clothes like I’ve never been before. Really, I say, I feel lots better. There’s stuff at school I’d rather eat a bug than miss.
CHAPTER 13
Maybe if Mother hadn’t taken it in her head to shoot Hector, we’d never have got back to Texas. But the sight of Mother green-eyed drunk on the other side of a nickel-plated pistol with a pearl handle—a weapon like something a saloon girl might pull out of her velvet drawstring bag to waggle at some mouthy, card-playing cowpoke in a bad Western—proved too much for Lecia. She got us the hell out of there. However, had she been polled in advance, Lecia might well have come down on the side of shooting Hector. So would I have. In some basic way, it was as good an idea as any that bobbed up that whole dark time.
They’d been staying at the bar a lot, Mother and Hector, leaving us home. I kept a late watch for them every night. The bar sat only a few blocks away, but Mother seemed a prime candidate for plowing drunk into something with more molecular density than herself—a slab of concrete or brick wall, maybe. After last call, I stood in my stripy Sears PJs at the upstairs window waiting for the Impala to surge up the snowy drive. I rubbed a fist-sized clear spot in the glass frost so I could better study the garage, its square black mouth like some toothless set of jaws. The driveway could lie unmarred by headlights and tire treads for what seemed a zillion heartbeats while I watched.
Lecia and I stopped hanging out at the Longhorn when guns showed up there in the palsied, uncertain, and sometimes liver-spotted hands of the Longhorn patrons and help. A robbery at the steakhouse up the block led Deeter to get fitted with a small shoulder holster. He wore it under his barkeep’s apron. A few days later, Hector set out for the pawnshop to pick up a .22 pistol for his cousin to keep her husband at bay. Then he got his own Colt .45. All one afternoon he sat at a cocktail table fiddling with it. He’d sight down the barrel at a pedestrian trotting down Main Street. This was troubling. In Texas any four-year-old knew you didn’t point a firearm at a live creature unless you wanted it dead. Even a busted, empty gun got handled like a snake.
Mother’s pearl-handled job struck me as silly at first. I’d seen a cigarette lighter shaped much like it at a roadside joke shop once. It hung in a plastic bag from a spinning rack of other gags, including a small pink puddle of plastic dog vomit I spent my last nickel on.
Mother swore to keep the pistol tucked safe in her Coach bag. She just wanted it, she said, in case anybody ever tried to bother her. Who—my eight-year-old head wondered—would ever dare mess with Mother? I knew for a fact that she would have smacked the dogshit out of any yahoo who even approximated getting ready to bother her. The gun was—in a word I pinched off Lecia’s sixth-grade spelling list—superfluous.
Guns per se didn’t worry me. Every pickup in Leechfield sported a National Rifle Association sticker and rifle rack in the back window. I’d fired my first pistol way before kindergarten. Two-handed on New Year’s Eve, I’d leveled Daddy’s .22 over the garage roof and straight at the pie-faced moon. At the stroke of midnight, I squeezed the trigger. My hand flew up a good half yard, but I barely flinched at the blast. When the moon itself didn’t go hissing across the black sky like a plugged balloon, I busted out crying. Later, my BB gun took down all manner of sparrows and blackbirds. By second grade, if Daddy braced himself behind me, I could shoulder and shoot a four-ten shotgun without the recoil knocking my arm out of socket. That meant I waded into the black marshes during duck season in winter, and spring found me trotting behind while the men bagged brown morning doves for gumbo.
Still, the sudden appearance of those guns in that bar set a shimmer of anxiety going in some watery place in my middle. They rested in the hands of people who’d never held firearms before. Fools, to a one. Like Hector, Gordon would draw his Magnum like Wyatt Earp for a joke, then shoo me off, saying the safety was on, or the chamber hollow.
One night Joey fell into a crying jag at the bar. His poor poppa had died in the mines at forty, and he pressed Mother’s pistol to his temple, that shallow place where his hairline was starting to back up. After that, we’d stopped going to the bar, Lecia and I. But Mother hung on to her joke pistol. The night she decided to shoot Hector, it appeared in her hand fast.
Lecia had been playing the piano when Hector two-stepped out of the bedroom sloshing scotch. He stood behind the bench all misty-eyed. After a few bouncing renditions of “Alley Cat,” he asked her to play the national anthem. She said she didn’t feel like it. Hector even dug down in his trouser pocket and hauled out a wadded-up ten-dollar bill. He smoothed it flat on the keyboard. He said that money was all hers if she’d only play “America the Beautiful.” I pointed out that “America the Beautiful” wasn’t the national anthem, which insight caused Hector to smile blurrily at me while Lecia wadded up his ten-spot and pitched it onto the strings. She banged down the keyboard cover and stood up. She wasn’t playing diddly-squat, she said.
Usually, that would have sent old Hector sulking off to bed. But for some reason, he took offense. Maybe because at dinner he’d been talking about the brother he’d lost in World War II. Hearing the national anthem got all balled up in his mind with that brother’s funeral—the flag folded neat in a navy-blue triangle some officer handed over to his mother, the fistful of dirt Hector himself had tossed down the oblong hole onto the polished box they lowered by hand on straps.
Anyway, Lecia stood, and Hector’s face wor
ked itself into a twist we’d never seen. He wound up calling Lecia a spoiled little bitch. Now, nobody would dispute we were spoiled. But the “bitch” part hit some string in Mother, and the next thing we knew she held that pistol.
Night had blacked out the bay windows behind her. She had on a silk slip the color of mayonnaise. Underneath that slip was her long-line conical bra, which turned breasts into something not unlike artillery. Hector slumped in the rose chintz armchair. His head bobbed down, so folds of neck skin gathered around his chin like a basset hound’s. He said go on and shoot, his life wasn’t worth a nickel anyway.
I got the idea to fling myself across his body. I was betting Mother wouldn’t plug me to get at him. And the move did draw her up short. She squinted at me as if I were a long ways off. When she waved the gun sideways to motion me out of the way, her arm looked boneless and wiggly as an eel. Scoot over, she said.
Lecia begged her not to pull the trigger, while I draped the length of my body down his front like a lobster bib. He smelled of Burma-Shave and scotch. His belly was wishy under all the knobs and angles of me. I sank into that softness a notch, then craned my head back to see what effect I was having on Mother.
A mist from somewhere inside her skull seemed to skitter behind her green eyes. She was considering. Her hand even dropped a few degrees from its straight-on angle. My poor, poor babies, she said. Then the lines of her face drew up and hardened into something like resolve. Get offa him, Mary Marlene, she said. Hector’s breath was wicked sour when he pleaded back to her, Honey…to which she said shut up.