by Kate Wilhelm
“I’ll come over,” Jean said. “What kind of cards?”
“Canasta. We’ll snag a table and you can find us. See ya.” Jean could not identify the foods on her plate that night. After three bites, she put her fork down and drank her watery coffee.
“I got cheese and some dark rye bread and even a little wine, over in my room,” a man said in a low voice behind her.
She looked around. He was about sixty, with lank gray hair and stubble on his chin. He looked at her throat, down her body, back to her throat. He didn’t look at her face.
She shook her head and turned away from him.
“Even some chocolate,” he mumbled.
“Leave me alone.”
“Wouldn’t hurt you or nothing. I don’t mean no harm. . . .”
She looked at the people across the table from her, three women in a row, all studiously staring at their plates. On one side of her a man ate, talked now and then to a woman companion. On the other side three children whined and ate and quarreled with each other. No one paid any attention to the old man and Jean.
Throughout the hall there were the sounds of forks hitting the tables, cups being put down hard, feet scuffling, bare feet padding on the dirty floors, voices that merged and became a noise altogether different from human voices, more like the indecipherable sounds of the surf. A child began to cough in a harsh, whooping-cough way.
The man was still there, staring at her, she knew. Her hands were shaking too much to lift her coffee now, and she knew she could not stand and leave without bumping into him. Maybe that was what he was waiting for, for her to rise and for one moment to have her body against his. Maybe he would seize her arm, touch her. . . .
At the far end of the dining room someone began to scream, and there were shouts and cries. The old man behind Jean’s chair shuffled away toward the excitement. She jerked up her tray and hurried to deposit it at a counter, and ran from the dining room. Outside she stopped. It was still bright with sunlight, and now people were streaming toward the rec building; the children shouted and cried and yelled and played in the mud. A group of teen-aged boys came toward jean, three abreast on the walkway, arms linked. They didn’t slow down as they drew near her; they were thirteen, fourteen, not yet mature enough to shave. Their faces were particularly childish, she thought, and she knew they would trample her if she did not back up, or step into the mud to get out of their way.
Behind her several women’s voices suddenly were raised, and one of them shouldered past her, a thick woman with a long pole in one hand. She strode past Jean without a glance at her. Jean looked at the others then, all middle-aged, all staring grimly at the boys, who stopped, then broke and ran off the walkway through the mud toward the rec building, yelling obscenities as they went.
She moved aside to allow the other women to pass, and then followed them gratefully until they turned in at a building two short of her own. She knew she could not go to play cards that evening, perhaps never. She didn’t even know how to play canasta.
She almost ran to her own building and up the stairs, afraid now of every sound, of every person who approached. By the time she reached her own door she was breathless.
“Are you all right?” a soft voice asked. The door next to her own was open a few inches, revealing a woman’s face.
She nodded, groping for the key chain on her neck, her fingers trembling and awkward.
The woman hesitated, then opened her door a bit more. Now Jean could see a small child standing behind her, a little girl. The child suddenly smiled at her.
“I was starting out,” the woman said, “and heard someone running, so I waited to make sure it was all right. I thought someone was after you.”
The little girl said, “My name’s Melinda. What’s your name?”
Jean smiled at her then. “Jean.”
“I’m five years old. How old are you?”
Now Jean laughed. “I’m much older than that. I’m twenty-six. You are very pretty, Melinda.”
“I have to go to the toilet.”
“I’m Virginia Petryk. She has the manners of a princess, don’t you think?”
Jean nodded. Princess, she thought; that was exactly right. “I’ll go with you,” she said.
Virginia and Melinda came all the way out now and Virginia carefully locked her door, tried it to make certain, and then took Melinda’s hand in hers. “I usually wait until I see someone I know, at least by sight, before we come out,” she said. “Especially in the evenings. You’ve been warned?”
“Yes. How long have you been here?”
“Eight months. My husband is looking for a job. He’s an accountant. We’re from Sacramento.”
“I can read,” Melinda said.
“That’s wonderful. Do you have any books?”
“I have four books, and we always get more from the library.”
“I was a teacher,” Virginia said. “Elementary school, third grade.”
“Are you working here?”
She shook her head. “No jobs. We go into Chicago, go to the library. I have a friend’s card. So far no one has bothered us. It won’t last, I guess, but we’re making the most of it as long as it does.”
The rest rooms were crowded; they had to wait in line. Half an hour later they returned to their rooms. Jean had offered to watch Melinda while Virginia used the toilet, but after a hesitation so brief it might not have been there at all, Virginia had shaken her head, smiling her thanks. Walking back to their rooms, she explained, “I promised myself that she won’t be out of my sight while we’re here. Isn’t that the very model of an overprotective mother?”
Jean looked at the child skipping along by her mother’s side and shook her head. “I’d do exactly the same thing,” she said grimly.
At their doors Virginia asked shyly, “After a while, after Melinda’s sleeping, would you like to come over and talk?”
“I’d love to. Tap on the wall. I’ll hear you.”
She felt almost light-hearted when she entered her own room then. She could hear soft laughter through the wall, and she smiled.
The two women talked for two hours that night, until Virginia began to yawn. “I’m used to such early hours,” she apologized. “We get up at dawn, nearly first in line for breakfast every morning. Sorry.”
The next day Jean looked for them everywhere. She knocked on their door two times without success, and then in the afternoon she went for a walk around the perimeter of the Newtown. Everywhere it was the same, although the different areas were sectioned off from one another by streets twice as wide as they were in other places. Section 1, Section 2, Section 3 . . . all alike, even to the squalling children and the insolent, bored teen-agers and the tough middle-aged women. Abruptly she turned her back on Newtown and started across the field west of the settlement. It was the only way she could walk; the other three sides were bordered by highways. The field stretched on before her endlessly. It was high in grass and weeds, and completely flat. Already, in May, the sun was very hot, and the wind was steady, dry, and warm. Soon the mud would be gone, and there would be dust everywhere. Her legs were starting to throb when she came in sight of the fence that marked the boundary of Newtown. Beyond it she could see ocher and tan and brown houses, a subdivision. The fence was well above her head, eight feet high. She did not approach it, but stood and looked at the houses, with shrubs and trees in the yards. Some children came running around a house, stopped when they saw her, stared, then turned and ran away again.
“Watch out or the Newtown monsters will get you,” she whispered.
After a long time she bowed her head and returned to Newtown and to her room. She heard Virginia and Melinda when they got home, but now she did not bother to knock on their door. They had a life here, they were busy doing something, they could laugh and giggle at night. She felt she had no place in their lives at all.
Then she heard a soft tapping on her wall and she sat up so fast that she felt almost ashamed of her r
elief that they had not forgotten her. She tapped back.
“Are you home?” Melinda’s voice came through the wall.
“Yes. Are you?”
“No!” The child laughed hard and Virginia shushed her.
“Have you had dinner yet?”
“No. Have you?”
“No. Want to go now?”
Jean nodded, then said, “I sure do. I’m ready.”
That night Virginia told her how they spent their time. “We go to town,” she said. “But we don’t get on the bus here. You know they stamp your hand, make you pay the round-trip fare if you board in Newtown. The mark of the beast,” she added. “We walk through the field, go through a hole in the fence and over to the subdivision and catch a regular bus there, pay our fare like anyone else. We come back on the Newtown bus so we won’t have to walk so far both ways. No one cares if you come back without the stamp, as long as you pay. We window-shop, go to the library, eat our lunch in a park, pretend we’re visiting royalty. There are museums and exhibits and church music sometimes. If you aren’t stamped, they let you in those places, if you don’t look too Newtown-like, that is.”
The next day and frequently after that Jean went with them. She bought a notebook and began to make notes on her thesis, and she wrote in detail everything she knew of Leo Arkins’s work, her part in it, her doubts about it. She tried to apply for work, for volunteer work in the school, the clinic, anything, and there was nothing. The waiting list was pages long. She tried to keep pretending she was in college again— it was tolerable if she could keep up the pretense—but sometimes it was not possible and the pages stared at her defiantly, her mind a blank.
Every day there were fights and robberies and murders and rapes. The weather got hotter and the violence increased. The streets turned to dust, and the wind blew the dust constantly, coating everything with it. Soldiers came in trucks and spread oil, and that was even worse because now fresh oil was blown also when the harsh prairie winds howled through the streets.
The grass in the field turned brown and withered, and someone set fire to it. It burned with a great roar and when the lightning-fast fire died the field was a stubble of charred spearlike points. For days Virginia was afraid to take Melinda across it to go to town.
Jean’s grandmother died that summer. She had had several heart attacks, and her death was no surprise. Her grandfather wrote to her. He enclosed the deed to his house in Bend. “It’s yours, little Olahuene. There’s a little money to go with it; not much, I’m afraid. Never was a good saver. The water will be there again one day. I’d go back now, but somehow it doesn’t seem the same, me there alone, so I guess I’ll go fishing instead. All my love, all my love.”
She felt frozen when she finished reading the letter. Going fishing. Then she wept for her grandfather. A week later she received an official notice that he had been lost at sea in a small boat while fishing.
“I’m going home,” she said that night to Virginia. “Please come with me. He said he would go back and that means there’s enough water to live on, enough to drink anyway. He was telling me there’s enough to drink. That’s what he meant.” She was pleading, she knew, and could hear the desperation in her own voice, but did not stop.
Virginia simply shook her head. “I was there a year ago— oh, not right there, but Sacramento. Even if there’s a well, the smallest trickle of water, you couldn’t have it. They need it for agriculture. They made all non-agriculture people get out; why do you think they’d let you go back?”
“There isn’t any agriculture, not to speak of anyway, in that part of the country. It wouldn’t be taking water away from anything else.”
Virginia looked at her sleeping daughter. “I don’t blame you,” she said slowly. “If I were alone, I’d go too. But I’m not. I wouldn’t care if I starved or died of thirst—it would be better than this—but not for her. Not for her.”
Jean wrote to Corinne and then remembered that she was going to be gone for part of July, visiting her brother in Delaware. The days dragged, and she saw with horror how hideous the Newtown was, how degrading life had become for everyone here, and she marveled that she had been able to close her eyes to it for so long.
Now that she knew she was leaving, she could hardly bear staying. Every afternoon she checked the post office, desperate for Corinne’s reply, for the money that would buy her a ticket away from here.
The walk home was hot; she was covered with dirt by the time she got back to her building. Everywhere she turned there were the listless dirty hopeless people; heat drove them from the buildings, the blowing dust drove them back inside.
She waited in line for a shower and then started back toward her room at the far end of the hallway. It was nearly a hundred degrees inside her building; already, still wet from the shower, she could feel sweat trickling down her back.
She started to unlock her door, dully aware of three men shuffling toward her. At the other end of the hall voices broke out in a loud argument. She pushed the door, and at the same moment one of the men grabbed her with one arm around her waist, one hand hard over her mouth, and shoved her inside the room with his body. The other two rushed in and slammed the door and turned the lock. While one man yanked down the shade, another began to tear off her clothes. She tried to kick and the man holding her squeezed so hard she could not breathe and she felt herself suffocating, fainting.
He took his hand away from her mouth and something else was stuffed in, gagging her, and then they threw her onto the bed. Her hands were yanked above her head, tied to the rail; her legs were spread open, both feet tied to the rail at the foot of the bed.
One had already dropped his jeans; he lunged at her. She tried to draw up her knees, jerked her body, tried to get away from him, and he lifted her head by her hair and slapped her face hard, first one side, then the other. She stopped struggling. She would have screamed with pain then when he entered her; in her mind she could hear her scream.
They all raped her, but she was hardly conscious of them any longer. There was only pain. Distantly she felt them pulling the cords from her ankles, releasing her legs. Her hands were still bound together, tied to the rail of the bed. She was turned over and one of them tried to enter her through the rectum. When he couldn’t, he beat her with his belt, again and again and again. She knew her body was twitching with pain, but it was almost as if it were someone else’s pain, not hers. The gag was yanked from her mouth and she knew: that too. She began to vomit. She felt the belt cutting into her back again, and then, nothing else.
CHAPTER
8
“I’M going to release you,” the doctor said. “But you’ll need counseling. We have a service; groups, of course, but a good doctor . .
Jean shook her head.
“My dear child, you may not recognize the symptoms yourself, but you have suffered a trauma that is not only physical, but mental as well, and I can do nothing about the mental damage. Your stitches are out, you are healing nicely, but you have not spoken since your arrival. Your psyche is wounded perhaps even more than your body was.”
“I’m going home,” Jean said. “It will be all right.”
The doctor sighed. “Ah, you speak to us. And you have a home you can go to. That’s good. That’s very good.” She smiled at Jean then, patted her arm, and moved on to the next bed.
Jean stared at the ceiling and thought of Walter with his pseudo-paternal concern, drawing her out, reassuring her that this ordeal was over, that she was strong, she would recover. . . .
On the bus, pulling away from the endless suburbs, she kept thinking to herself, It will be all right as soon as I get home. Through the prairies she repeated it over and over, and when the dust storms slowed the progress of the bus so much that a running child would have beaten it, the phrase echoed and reechoed in her head. They crossed the aqueducts, bordered on both sides by green fields of corn that were being savaged by the blowing dust. It would be stunted, someone said to someone else
. She did not look around at the speaker; the words were meaningless to her.
In Seattle she made the transfer to Portland and learned there that the next bus to Bend would leave in two days. She nodded and walked to the nearest hotel, where she registered, paid in advance for a room and bath, and went up the stairs without even seeing the lobby. In her room she lay on the bed. The rhododendrons were gone, she thought suddenly, and stood up to look out the window at the city below. It looked much as it had when she and her grandparents had come here during the time she had lived with them. There was traffic, buses, people, but no rhododendrons. And the Columbia was now a small river, she thought, remembering, although when crossing it she had paid no attention.
There had been something else, she thought then, and began to shake. Something she had seen, had refused to see. A Newtown. The bus had passed a Newtown south of Seattle. Her shaking increased until she felt as if she were having a convulsion. She went to the mirror and gripped the dressing table hard, staring at herself. Nothing showed, no mark, no scar, nothing at all. She knew her back had scars, would always have scars, but now, studying her face in the mirror, she looked exactly the same as always. Her shaking stopped gradually and she went to the bathroom and showered, staying under the water for a long time even though a posted notice advised that there would be a surcharge added to her bill if she used more than twenty gallons a day.
Her room was costing her one hundred five dollars a day; her dinner of a sandwich, a glass of milk, and coffee cost fourteen dollars. She didn’t care. Two days later she paid the remainder of her bill, and the surcharge, and left to catch the bus to Bend. She was nearly home, she kept thinking. Even here the drought had changed everything, she realized, seeing the landscape now. The ferns were gone from the roadside. No moss grew up the trees, and many of the trees stood starkly naked, defoliated by insects or disease. A wide–ranging fire had blackened thousands of acres of forest land; the denuded hills looked like the aftermath of a holocaust. As the bus climbed the mountains to go over the pass, the greenery returned, but only for a short distance. On the eastern slopes, the undergrowth was gone, the ponderosa pines looked pale and lifeless, and long before they should have yielded to junipers, they were dead, and small clumps of junipers had sprouted here and there.