Then he ran back into the house.
The second time was a couple of days later. The weather had cleared and I was climbing onto my four-speed on the way to the store for my mother. Donny came riding up the driveway behind me on his old beat-up Schwinn.
“Where you going?”
“Over to the store. My mom needs milk and shit. You?”
“Up to Eddie’s. There’s a game on up at the water tower later. Braves versus Bucks. Want us to wait for you?”
“Nah.” It was Little League and didn’t interest me.
Donny shook his head.
“I gotta get outta here,” he said. “This stuff is driving me crazy. You know what they got me doin’ now?”
“What.”
“Throwin’ her shit pan out in back of the yard! You believe that?”
“I don’t get it. Why?”
“She’s not allowed upstairs at all anymore. No toilet privileges, nothin’. So the stupid little fuck tries to hold it. But even she’s got to piss and shit sometime and now I got the goddamn detail! You believe it? What the hell’s the matter with Woofer?” He shrugged. “But Mom says it’s got to be one of us older guys.”
“Why?”
“How the hell do I know?”
He pushed off.
“Hey, you sure you don’t want us to wait up for you?”
“Nah. Not today.”
“Okay. See ya then. Stop over, huh?”
“Okay, I will.”
I didn’t, though. Not then.
It seemed so foreign to me. I couldn’t even imagine her going to the bathroom, much less using a pan that somebody would have to dump in back of the yard. What if I went over there and they hadn’t cleaned up yet that day? What if I had to smell her piss and shit down there? The whole thing disgusted me. She disgusted me. That wasn’t Meg. That was somebody else.
It became yet another strange new image to trouble me. And the problem was there was nobody to talk to, nobody to sort things out with.
If you talked to the kids on the block it was clear that everybody had some notion of what was happening over there—some vague and others pretty specific. But nobody had any opinions about it. It was as though what was happening were a storm or a sunset, some force of nature, something that just happened sometimes. And there was no point discussing summer showers.
I knew enough to be aware that, if you were a boy, you were expected to bring some matters to your father.
So I took a shot at that.
Now that I was older I was supposed to put in some time at the Eagle’s Nest now and then, helping to stock and clean up and whatnot, and I was working on the grill in the kitchen with a whetstone and some soda water, pushing the grease into the side troughs with the whetstone as the grill slowly cooled and the soda water loosened the grease—drudge work of the kind I’d seen Meg do a thousand times—when finally I just started talking.
My father was making shrimp salad, crumbling bits of bread in to make it stretch further.
There was a liquor delivery coming in and through the windowed partition between bar and kitchen we could see Hodie, my dad’s day shift bartender, ticking off the cartons on an order sheet and arguing with the delivery man over a couple cases of vodka. It was the house brand and evidently the guy had shorted him. Hodie was mad. Hodie was a rail-thin Georgia cracker with a temper volatile enough to have kept him in the brig throughout half the war. The delivery man was sweating.
My father watched, amused. Except to Hodie, two cases was no big deal. Just so long as my father wasn’t paying for something he wasn’t getting. But maybe it was Hodie’s anger that got me started.
“Dad,” I said. “Did you ever see a guy hit a girl?”
My father shrugged.
“Sure,” he said. “I guess so. Kids. Drunks. I’ve seen a few. Why?”
“You figure it’s ever … okay … to do that?”
“Okay? You mean justified?”
“Yeah.”
He laughed. “That’s a tough one,” he said. “A woman can really tick you off sometimes. I’d say in general, no. I mean, you got to have better ways to deal with a woman than that. You have to respect the fact that the woman’s the weaker of the species. It’s like being a bully, you know?”
He wiped his hands on his apron. Then he smiled.
“Only thing is,” he said, “I’ve got to say I’ve seen ’em deserve it now and then. You work in a bar, you see that kind of thing. A woman gets too much to drink, gets abusive, loud, maybe even takes a poke at the guy she’s with. Now what’s he supposed to do? Just sit there? So he whacks her one. Now, you’ve got to break up that kind of thing straightaway.
“See, it’s like the exception that proves the rule. You should never hit a woman, never—and God forbid I ever catch you doing it. Because if I do you’ve had it. But sometimes there’s nothing else you can do. You get pushed that far. You see? It works both ways.”
I was sweating. It was as much the conversation as the work but with the work there I had an excuse.
My father had begun on the tuna salad. There was crumbled bread in that too, and pickle relish. In the next room Hodie had run the guy back to his truck to search for the missing vodka.
I tried to make sense of what he was saying: it was never okay but then sometimes it was.
You get pushed that far.
That got stuck in my mind. Had Meg pushed Ruth too hard at some point? Done something I hadn’t seen?
Was this a never or a sometimes situation?
“Why d’you ask?” said my father.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some of us were talking.”
He nodded. “Well, best bet’s to keep your hands to yourself. Men or women. That’s how you stay out of trouble.”
“Yes, sir.”
I poured some more soda water on the grill and watched it sizzle.
“People say Eddie’s dad beats up on Mrs. Crocker, though. On Denise and Eddie too.”
My father frowned. “Yes. I know.”
“You mean it’s true.”
“I didn’t say it was true.”
“But it is, right?”
He sighed. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re all of a sudden so interested. But you’re old enough to know, to understand I guess … it’s like I said before. Sometimes you get pushed, a man feels pushed, and he does … what he knows he shouldn’t ought to do.”
And he was right. I was old enough to understand. And I heard a subtext there. Distinct as the echoes of Hodie yelling at the delivery man outside.
At some point and for some reason, my father had hit my mother.
And then I even half remembered it. Waking up out of a deep sleep. The crash of furniture. Yelling. And a slap.
A long time ago.
I felt a sudden shock of anger toward him. I looked at his bulk and thought about my mother. And then slowly the coldness set in, the sense of isolation and of safety.
And it occurred to me that my mother was the one to talk to about all this. She’d know how it felt, what it meant.
But I couldn’t then. Not even if she’d been there right that minute. I didn’t try.
I watched my father finish the salads and wipe his hands again on the white cotton apron we used to joke about getting condemned by the Board of Health and then start slicing salami on the electric meat slicer he’d just bought and was so proud of and I pushed the grease into the trough until the grill was shiny clean.
And nothing whatever was solved.
And soon I went back again.
Chapter Thirty-Two
What brought me back was that single unstoppable image of Meg’s body.
It sparked a thousand fantasies, day and night. Some of them tender, some violent—some ridiculous.
I’d be lying in bed at night with the transistor radio hidden under the pillow playing Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop,” and I’d close my eyes and there would be Meg jitterbugging with some unseen pa
rtner, the only girl at Teen’s Canteen dancing in a pair of white bobby sox rolled down at the top and nothing else. Comfortable with her nudity as though she’d just bought the emperor’s new clothes.
Or we’d be playing Monopoly sitting across from one another and I’d hit Boardwalk or Marvin Gardens and she’d stand up and sigh and step out of her thin white cotton panties.
But more often the song on the radio would be something like “Twilight Time” by the Platters and Meg would be naked in my arms in the deep blue Technicolor starlight and we’d kiss.
Or the game would be The Game—and there was nothing funny about it at all.
I felt nervous and jumpy.
I felt like I had to go over. Just as I was afraid of what I’d find when I did.
Even my mother noticed it. I’d catch her watching me, lips pursed, wondering, as I leapt up from the dinner table spilling the water glass or lurched into the kitchen for a Coke.
Perhaps that was one reason I never spoke to her. Or maybe it was just that she was my mother, and a woman.
But I did go over.
And when I did, things had changed again.
I let myself in and the first thing I heard was Ruth coughing, then talking in a low voice, and I realized it had to be Meg she was speaking to. She had that tone she would never have used to any of the rest of us, like she was a teacher talking to a little girl, instructing. I went downstairs.
They’d rigged up the work light, strung the cable from the outlet over the washer to a hook in one of Willie Sr.’s crossbeams. The caged bulb dangled, brightly glaring.
Ruth was sitting in a folding chair, part of the old card-table set they kept down there, sitting with her back to me, smoking. Cigarette butts littered the floor like she’d been there a while.
The boys were nowhere around.
Meg was standing in front of her in a frilly yellow dress, not the sort of dress you’d picture her wearing at all, and I guessed it was Ruth’s, and old, and could see it was none too clean. It had short puffy sleeves and a full pleated skirt, so that her arms and legs were bare.
Ruth was wearing a blue-green version of something similar, but plainer, less flounce and frills.
Above the cigarette smoke I could smell camphor. Mothballs.
Ruth kept talking.
You might have thought they were sisters at first, roughly the same weight though Ruth was taller and skinnier, both of them with hair that was slightly oily now and both of them wearing these old smelly dresses like they were trying things on for a party.
Except that Ruth just sat there smoking.
While Meg was up against one of Willie’s four-by-four support posts, arms tied tightly around it behind her back, feet tied too.
She had the gag on but no blindfold.
“When I was a girl like you,” Ruth was saying, “I did, I searched for God. I went to every church in town. Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist. You name it. I even went to the novenas over at Saint Matties, sat up in the balcony where the organ was.
“That was before I knew, see, what women were. And you know who taught me? My mom did.”
“’Course, she didn’t know she was teaching me, not the way I’m teaching you. It was more what I saw.
“Now I want you to know and understand that they gave me everything, my parents did—everything a girl could wish for, that’s what I had. Except for college of course, but girls didn’t go in for college much in those days anyhow. But my daddy, rest his soul, he worked hard for a living and my momma and me, we had it all. Not like Willie did me.”
She lit a new Tareyton from the butt of the old one and tossed the butt to the floor. And I guessed she hadn’t noticed me behind her or else she didn’t care because even though Meg was looking right at me with a strange sort of expression on her face, and even though I’d made the usual noise coming down the rickety old stairs, she didn’t turn or stop talking, not even to light the cigarette. She talked right through the smoke.
“But my daddy drank like Willie,” she said, “and I’d hear him. Him coming in nights and straight for the bed and mount my mother like a mare. I’d hear ‘em huffin’ and puffin’ up in there, my mother no-no-no-ing and the occasional odd slap now and then and that was just like Willie too. Because we women repeat the same mistakes as our mothers made giving in all the time to a man. I had that weakness too and that’s how come I got all these boys he left me with to starve with. Can’t work the way I did, back there during the war. The men get all the jobs now. And I’ve got kids to raise.
“Oh, Willie sends the checks but it’s not enough. You know that. You see that. Your checks don’t do much good either.
“Can you see what I’m saying to you? You got the Curse. And I don’t mean your period. You got it worse even than I ever did. I can smell it on you, Meggy! You’ll be doing just what my mother and I did with some asshole of an Irishman beatin’ up on you and fuckin’ you and making you like it, makin’ you love it, and then wham, he’s up and gone.
“That fucking. That’s the thing. That warm wet pussy of yours. That’s the Curse, you know? Curse of Eve. That’s the weakness. That’s where they got us.
“I tell you. A woman’s nothing but a slut and an animal. You got to see that, you got to remember. Just used and screwed and punished. Nothing but a stupid loser slut with a hole in her and that’s all she’ll ever be.
“Only thing I can do for you is what I’m doing. I can sort of try to burn it outta you.”
She lit a match.
“See?”
She tossed it at Meg’s yellow dress. It died reaching her and fell smoking to the floor. She lit another.
“See?”
She leaned in farther this time and tossed it and when the match hit the dress it was still burning. It lodged between the pleats. Meg squirmed against the four-by-four and shook it off.
“Strong young healthy girl like you—you think you smell so fresh and good. But to me you smell like burning. Like hot cunt. You got the Curse and the weakness. You’ve got it, Meggy.”
There was a small black spot on her dress where the match had been. Meg was looking at me, making sounds behind the gag.
Ruth dropped her cigarette and shifted her foot to grind it out.
She got off the chair, leaned down and struck another match. The room seemed suddenly thick with sulfur.
She held it to the hem of the dress.
“See?” she said. “I’d think you’d be grateful.”
Meg squirmed, struggling hard against the ropes. The hem charred brown and black but did not flare.
The match burned low. Ruth shook it out and dropped it.
Then she lit another.
She held it low to the hem, the same place she’d already burned. There was a feeling about her like some strange mad scientist performing an experiment in a movie.
The scorched dress smelled like ironing.
Meg struggled. Ruth just took her dress in hand and applied the match until it began to burn, then dropped it back against Meg’s leg.
I watched the thin line of flame start crawling.
Spreading.
It was like Woofer with his soldiers in the incinerator. Only this was for real. Meg’s high muffled squealing made it real.
It was halfway up her thigh now.
I started to move, to bat the flames out with my hands. Then Ruth reached over and doused her dress with the Coke she’d had sitting beside her on the floor.
She looked at me, laughing.
Meg slumped with relief.
I guess I looked pretty scared. Because Ruth kept laughing. And I realized that part of her must have been aware I was there behind her all along. But she didn’t care. My eavesdropping didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but her concentration on the lesson she was giving Meg. It was there in her eyes, something I’d never seen before.
I’ve seen it since.
Too frequently.
In the eyes of my first wife, after her second nervo
us breakdown. In the eyes of some of her companions at the “rest home.” One of whom, I’m told, murdered his wife and infant children with a pair of garden shears.
It’s a cold, stark emptiness that has no laughter in it. No compassion, and no mercy. It’s feral. Like the eyes of a hunting animal.
Like the eyes of snakes.
That was Ruth.
“What do you think?” she said. “Think she’ll listen?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You want to play cards?”
“Cards?”
“Crazy Eights or something.”
“Sure. I guess.” Anything, I thought. Anything you want to do.
“Just till the boys come home,” she said.
We went upstairs and played and I don’t think we said ten words to each other the whole game.
I drank a lot of Cokes. She smoked a lot of cigarettes.
She won.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It turned out that Donny, Willie, and Woofer had been to a matinee of How to Make a Monster. That would have pissed me off ordinarily because just a few months ago we’d seen a double bill together of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and this was a kind of sequel, with the same monsters, and they were supposed to wait for me or at least remind me. But they said it wasn’t as good as the first two anyway and I was still thinking about what I’d seen below, and as Ruth and I got to the last couple of hands the subject came round to Meg.
“She stinks,” said Woofer. “She’s dirty. We ought to wash her.”
I hadn’t noticed any stink.
Just camphor, smoke and sulfur.
And Woofer was one to talk.
“Good idea,” said Donny. “It’s been a while. I bet she’d like it.”
“Who cares what she likes?” said Willie.
Ruth just listened.
“We’d have to let her come upstairs,” said Donny. “She could try to run away.”
“Come on. Where’s she gonna go?” said Woofer. “Where’s she gonna run to? Anyway we could tie her.”
“I guess.”
“And we could get Susan.”
“I guess so.”
“Where is she?”
“Susan’s in her room,” said Ruth. “I think she hides from me.”