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Another voice said, “Who brought the Vaseline?”
“Shit. It’s in the truck.”
“Well … we don’t need it.”
Somebody reached between my legs and pawed my genitals; then I felt him spread the cheeks of my butt and spit. His warm saliva splattered my bottom and …
I pitched forward, the pressure off my arms and hair, the hands off my bottom. My head banged into something and I struck out to hit my hand against something which gave. I turned, clutched at my pants, pulled them up from my knees, while I sobbed for air, my heart pounding and my entire body shaking.
It was dark, but the air was still and I was alone. I wasn’t outside anymore. A patch of moonlight came through a window six feet away to shine on bookshelves. I tasted blood again, gingerly touched my split upper lip. I walked carefully down to the patch of light and looked around.
I pulled a book from the shelf and opened it. The stamp on the inside cover told me what I already knew. I was back in the fiction section of the Stanville Public Library and I was sure I’d gone mad.
That was the second time.
The first time I ended up in the library, it was open, I wasn’t bleeding, my clothes were clean, and I just walked away … from that building, from that town, from that life.
I thought I’d pulled a blank. I thought that whatever my father did to me was so terrible that I’d simply chosen not to remember it. That I’d only come back to myself after reaching the safety of the library.
The thought of pulling a blank was scary, but it wasn’t strange to me. Dad pulled blanks all the time and I’d read enough fiction to be familiar with trauma-induced amnesia.
I was surprised that the library was closed and dark this time. I checked the wall clock. It read two o’clock, an hour and five minutes later than the digital clock in Topper’s truck. Jesus Christ I shivered in the library’s air-conditioning and fumbled at my pants. The zipper was broken but the snap worked. I buckled the belt an extra notch tight, then pulled my shirt out so it hung over the zipper. My mouth tasted of blood and vomit.
The library was lit from without by pale white moonlight and the yellow glare of mercury streetlamps. I threaded my way between shelves, chairs, tables to the water fountain and rinsed my mouth again and again until the taste was gone from my mouth and the bleeding of my lip had stopped.
In two weeks I’d worked my way over nine hundred miles from my father. In one heartbeat I’d undone that, putting myself fifteen minutes away from the house. I sat down on a hard wooden chair and put my head in my hands. What had I done to deserve this?
There was something I wasn’t dealing with. I knew it. Something …
I’m so tired. All I want is to rest. I thought of all the snatches of sleep I’d had over the last two weeks, miserable stolen moments on rest-stop benches, in people’s cars, and under bushes like some animal. I thought of the house, fifteen minutes away, of my bedroom, of my bed.
A wave of irresistible longing came over me and I found myself standing and walking, without thought, just desire for that bed. I went to the emergency exit at the back, the one with the ALARM WILL SOUND sign. I figured by the time any alarm was answered, I could be well away.
It was chained. I leaned against it and hit it very hard, an overhand blow with the back of my hand. I drew back, tears in my eyes, to hit it again but it wasn’t there and I pitched forward, off balance and flailing, into my bed
I knew it was my bed I think it was the smell of the room that told me first, but the backlit alarm-clock face on the bedside table was the one Mom sent the year after she left and the light from the back porch light streamed through the window at just the right angle.
For one brief moment I relaxed, utterly and completely, muscle after muscle unknotting. I closed my eyes and felt exhaustion steal over me in a palpable wave. Then I heard a noise and I jerked up, rigid, on the bedspread on my hands and knees. The sound came again. Dad … snoring.
I shuddered. It was. strange. It was a very comforting sound. It was home, it was family. It also meant the son of a bitch was asleep.
I took off my shoes and padded down the hall. The door was half open and the overhead light was on. He was sprawled diagonally across the bed, on top of the covers, both shoes and one sock off, his shirt unbuttoned. There was an empty bottle of scotch tucked in the crook of his arm. I sighed.
Home sweet home.
I grabbed the bottle neck and pulled it gently from between his arm and his side, then set it on the bedside table. He snored on, oblivious. I took his pants off then, pulling the legs alternately to work them past his butt. They came free abruptly and his wallet fell from the back pocket. I hung the pants over the back of a chair, then went through the wallet.
He had eighty bucks plus his plastic. I took three twenties, then started to put it on the dresser, but stopped. When I folded the wallet, it seemed stiffer than it should, and thicker. I looked closer. There was a hidden compartment covered by a flap with fake stitching. I got it open and nearly dropped the wallet. It was full of hundred-dollar bills.
I turned the light off and carried the wallet back to my room, where I counted twenty-two crisp hundred-dollar bills onto the bed.
I stared down at the money, four rows of five, one row of two, my eyes wide. My ears were burning and my stomach suddenly hurt. I went back to Dad’s room and stared at him for a while.
This was the man who took me to the mission and the secondhand stores to buy clothes for school. This was the man who made me take peanut butter and jelly to school every day rather than part with a crummy ninety cents’ worth of lunch money. This was the man who beat me when I’d suggested an allowance for doing the yard work.
I picked up the empty scotch bottle and hefted it, shifted my grip to the neck. It was cold, smooth, and just the right size for my small hands. The glass didn’t slip or shift as I swung it experimentally. The glass at the base of the bottle was extra thick where the manufacturer had chosen to give the impression of a bigger bottle. It looked very strong.
Dad snored away, his mouth open, his face slack. His skin, pale normally, looked white as paper in the overhead light. His forehead, receding, domed, lined, looked egglike, white, fragile. I felt the base of the bottle with my left hand. It felt more than heavy enough.
Shit.
I put the bottle back down on the table, turned off the light, and went back to my room.
I took notebook paper, cut it dollar-bill-size, and stacked it until it felt as thick as the pile of hundreds. It took twenty sheets to match the stiffness of the money—maybe it was thicker or just newer. I put the cut paper in the wallet and put it back in the pocket of his slacks.
Then I went to the garage and took down the old leather suitcase, the one Granddad gave me when he retired, and packed it with my clothes, toiletries, and the leather-bound set of Mark Twain that Mom left me.
After I’d closed the suitcase, stripped off my dirty clothes, and put on my suit, I just stood looking around the room, swaying on my feet. If I didn’t start moving soon, I’d drop.
There was something else, something I could use….
I thought of the kitchen, only thirty feet away, down the hall and across the den. Before Mom left, I’d loved to sit in there while she cooked, just talking, telling her stupid jokes. I closed my eyes and pictured it, tried to feel it.
The air around me changed, or maybe it was just the noise. I was in a quiet house, but just the sound of my breathing reflecting off walls sounded different from room to room.
I was in the kitchen.
I nodded my head slowly, tiredly. Hysteria seethed beneath the surface, a rising bubble that threatened to undo me. I pushed it down and looked in the refrigerator.
Three six-packs of Schlitz, two cartons of cigarettes, half a pizza in the cardboard delivery box. I shut the door and thought about my room. I tried it with my eyes open un-focused, picturing the spot between my desk and the window.
I was there and the room reeled, my eyes and maybe my inner ear just not ready for the change. I put my hand on the wall and the room stopped moving.
I picked up the suitcase and closed my eyes. I opened them in the library, dark shadows alternating with silver pools of moonlight. I walked to the front door and looked out at the grass.
Last summer, before school, I'd come up to the library, check out a book or two, and then move outside, to the grass under the elms. The wind would ruffle the pages, tug my hair and clothes around, and I would go into the words, find the cracks between the sentences and the words would go away, leaving me in the story, the action, the head of other people. Twice I left it too late and got home after Dad did. He liked supper ready. Only twice, though. Twice was more than enough.
I closed my eyes and the wind pushed my hair and fluttered my tie. The suitcase was heavy and I had to switch hands several times as I walked the two blocks to the bus station.
There was a bus for points east at 5:30 A.M. I bought a ticket to New York City for one hundred and twenty-two dollars and fifty-three cents. The clerk took the two hundreds without comment, gave me my change, and said I had three hours to wait.
They were the longest three hours I’ve ever spent. Every fifteen minutes I got up, dragged the suitcase to the bathroom, and splashed cold water in my face. Near the end of the wait the furniture was crawling across the floor, and every movement of the bushes outside the doors was my father, belt in hand, the buckle razor-edged and about the size of a hubcap.
The bus was five minutes late. The driver stowed my suitcase below, took the first part of my ticket, and ushered me aboard.
When we passed the tattered city-limits sign, I closed my eyes and slept for six hours.
TWO (#u262898e0-9266-5602-a62c-8f003fb15abd)
When I was twelve, just before Mom left, we went to New York City for a week. It was a terrible and wonderful trip. Dad was there for his company, all his days spent in meetings and business lunches. Mom and I went to museums, Chinatown, Macy’s, Wall Street, and rode the subway all the way out to Coney Island.
At night they fought, over dinner, at the one play we went to, and in the hotel room. Dad wanted sex and Mom wouldn’t, even after I was asleep, because the company was footing the bill for one room only and I was on a rollaway in the corner. Three times during that week he made me get dressed and go down and wait in the lobby for thirty minutes while they did it. The third time, I don’t think they did, though, ’cause Mom was crying in the bathroom when I came back and Dad was drinking, something he never did in front of my mother. Not usually.
The next day I saw that Mom had a bruise on her right cheekbone and she walked funny—not limping on any particular side, but like it hurt to move either leg.
Two days after we got back from New York, I came home from school and Mom was gone.
Anyway, I really liked New York. It seemed a good place to start over—a good place to hide.
“I’d like a room.”
The place was a dive, a transients’ hotel in Brooklyn, ten blocks from the nearest subway stop. I’d picked it with the help of the Pakistani cabdriver who drove me from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He’d stayed there himself.
The clerk was an older man, maybe my dad’s age, reading a Len Deighton novel through half-glasses. He lowered the book and tilted his head forward to look at me over the
“Too young,” he said. “You’re a runaway, I’ll bet.”
I put a hundred down on the counter, my hand still on it, like Philip Marlowe.
He laughed and put his hand on it. I lifted my hand away.
He looked at it closely, rubbing it between his fingers. Then he handed me a registration card and said, “Forty-eight a night, five-buck key deposit, bathroom’s down the hall, payment in advance.”
I gave him enough money for a week. He looked at the other hundreds for a moment, then gave me the room key and said, “Don’t deal here. I don’t care what you do away from the hotel, but if I see anything that looks like a deal, Ι’ll turn you myself.”
My jaw dropped open and I stared at him. “You mean drugs?”
“No—candy.” He looked at me again. “Okay. Maybe you don’t. But if I see anything like that at all, you’re history.”
My face was red and I felt like I’d done something wrong, even though I hadn’t. “I don’t do stuff like that,” I said, stammering.
I hated feeling like that.
He just shrugged. “Maybe not. I’m just warning you. And don’t bring any tricks here either.”
A memory of rough hands grabbing me and pulling down my pants made me cringe. “I don’t do that either!” I could feel a knot in my throat and tears were dangerously close to the surface.
He just shrugged again.
I carried my suitcase up six flights of stairs to the room and sat on the narrow bed. The room was ratty, with peeling wallpaper and the stench of old cigarette smoke, but the door and the door frame were steel and the lock seemed new.
The window looked out on an alley, a sooty brick wall five feet across the gap. I opened it and the smell of something rotting drifted in. I stuck my head out and saw bagged garbage below, half of it torn open and strewn about the alley. When I turned my head to the right I could see a thin slice of the street in front of the hotel.
I thought about what the clerk had said and I got mad again, feeling small, diminished. Why’d he have to make me feel like that? I was happy, excited about being in New York, and he jerked me around like that. Why did people have do that sort of shit?
Wouldn’t anything ever work out right?
“I don’t care how talented, smart, bright, hardworking, or perfect you are. You don’t have a high school diploma or a GED and we can’t hire you. Next!”
“Sure we hire high school kids. You seem pretty bright to me. Just let me have your social security number for the W2 and we’ll be all set. You don’t have a social security number? Where you from, Mars? You come back with a social security number and I’ll give you a try. Next!”
“This is the application for a social security number. Fill it out and let me see your birth certificate. You don’t have your birth certificate? Get it and come back. No exceptions. Next!”
“I’m sorry, but in this state, if you’re under eighteen, you must have parental permission to take the GED. If you’re under seventeen it takes a court order. You come back with your mother or father, and a birth certificate or New York driver’s license, and you can take it. Next!”
There is a point where you have to give up, at least for a while, and all you want to do is shut down. I rode the subway back to Brooklyn Heights, and walked numbly in the direction of my hotel.
It was late afternoon, heavily overcast, and the dingy, gray street seemed entirely appropriate to my mood.
God damn them! Why did they have to make me feel so little? With every interview, every rejection, I’d felt guiltier and guiltier. Ashamed of something but I didn’t know what. I kicked out at a piece of trash in the gutter and stubbed my toe on the curb. I blinked rapidly, my eyes blurring, the breath harsh in my throat. I wanted to just crawl into bed and hide.
I took a small cross street to get over to the avenue the hotel was on. The street was narrow, making it even darker, and there were plastic bags of garbage piled on the sidewalks, up against the stoops of old brownstone buildings. I didn’t know why they called these row houses brownstones; most of them were painted green or red or yellow. The garbage was piled so high before one building I had to step out into the street to pass. When I stepped back on the sidewalk, a man stepped out from a doorway and came toward me.
“You got a subway token to spare? Any change?”
I’d seen lots of panhandlers that day, mostly around the subway stations. They made me nervous, but those hungry days hitching away from Dad were still fresh in my memory. I remembered people walking past me as if I didn’t exist. I dug into my pocket for the sixth time that day while I said, “Sure.”
My hand was coming out of the pocket when I heard a noise behind me. I started to look around and my head exploded.
There was something sticky between my cheek and the cold, gritty surface I was lying on. My right knee hurt and there was something about the way I was lying that didn’t seem right, like I’d been especially careless in going to bed. I tried to open my eyes but my left one seemed stuck shut. The right one looked at a rough concrete surface.
A sidewalk.
Memory and pain returned at the same time. I groaned.
There was the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk and I thought about the muggers. I jerked heavily up onto all fours, my head throbbing like the dickens, my sore knee becoming even more so as I put weight on it. The sticky stuff on the sidewalk was blood.
Standing seemed impossible so I turned over and sat, my back to a row of garbage cans. I looked up and saw a woman carrying two grocery bags slowing down as she walked around the giant pile of garbage bags and saw me.
“My gawd! Are you okay? What happened to you?”
I blinked my open eye and put my head in my hands. The effort of sitting up made a sharp, throbbing pain stab at the back of my head.
“I think I was hit from behind.” I felt for my front pocket, where I’d been carrying my money. “And robbed.”
I pulled the lids of my left eye apart with my fingers. My eye was okay, just stuck shut with blood. I carefully touched the back of my head. There was a large lump there, wet. My fingers came away red.
Great. I was in a strange city with no money, no job, no family, and no prospects. That stabbing pain at the back of my head didn’t compare with the hurt of somehow feeling I deserved this.
If I’d only been better as a kid. Maybe Mom wouldn’t have gone, Dad wouldn’t drink so much….
“My apartment is just two doors down. I’ll call nine-one-one.” The woman didn’t wait for a response. I watched her hurry past, a container of Mace in her hand, connected to her key chain. As she walked down the sidewalk, she stayed away from the buildings, checking the doorways as she went by.
Smart. Much smarter than me.
911. That meant police. I’m a minor and a runaway. I haveno ID and I don’t want my parents notified.
I thought about my hotel room, still three blocks away. I didn’t even feel like standing, much less walking three more blocks. I knew I’d feel safer there. I thought about my arrival there, of the steel door with the good lock, of the torn wallpaper. It was even paid up for three more days.
