Cursed Be the Child (25 page)

“No.”

She didn’t move. The palm stayed where it was. She smiled. Her plump lips were adorned with fluorescent purple. She had braces.

“Hey, come on, okay?” she said. “I wanna play some games.”

She wants to play games,
said The Rat.

“Come on, lemme have something. Don’t be a shit.” Her friends were laughing and egging her on. “Give me some spare change.”

“No,” he said, “get away from me.”

Too old for you?
said The Rat.

He walked on, hearing her call him a shithead.

An old guy was licking an ice cream cone with a reptilian tongue. Those too-goddamn-garish-to-be-true plaid pants! What was there about old men and hideous plaid pants? Hope to hell I remember so I don’t one day wind up an old man in ugly plaid pants…

A dirty old man in plaid pants?
said The Rat.

Though he knew he was in charge of the situation, Warren felt a trill of impatience. It was time.

Are you certain, Warren Barringer? You sure you want to meet The Rat? Let’s not forget, I am you, the worst of you and the real you.

No, not anymore. I’m the master of my fate, captain of my soul.

Spare me the melodramatics. Take a look over…

There! Across the way, in front of The Pay-Lo Shoe Store, he saw her. For an instant, his heart stopped, and then jumped to a rapid thudding in his chest.

She was lost. He could see that by the panicky way her eyes darted up and down and all around, by the way she slipped inside the shoe store then popped right back out again.

People walked past her, ignoring her as if she were invisible. She turned her head with the stiff precision of a bird, hoping to bring a familiar face into focus.

Then it was his face she focused on, as he stooped down in front of her. Her eyes were so big and frightened they were almost cartoony. She was a perfect towhead, but her hair had been clipped roughly and amateurishly. She was missing a tooth on the bottom, and her lips were full and pink.

And she was a beautiful child, he thought. Five years old? Six?

She was a beautiful little girl who needed him.

“You’re lost, aren’t you?”

A nod and a sniffle.

Lost and more than that. In weather like this, she was wearing skimpy shorts and a filthy T-shirt. And her feet were dirty and her knees were bruised and it looked like infected bug bites on her arm.

She took a small step back, as if perhaps recalling warnings about talking to strangers.

“What’s your name, honey?”

“Angie.” Her voice was small and sweet and Southern. “My mama went in there”—she turned to point back into the shoe store—“an’ I was with her, and then she was gone, and I came out to find her.” More sniffles, and then, bright teary diamonds rolling down her cheeks.

“Angie,” he said. “I think you ought to come with me.”

That’s just what you think, isn’t it, Warren? That’s just what you need, what you’ve wanted all your life!
The Rat was laughing.

“I dunno…”

“I’ll help you, Angie. I’ll take care of you…”

Take care of her, be sweet to her, and touch her and feel her sweetness and her softness, feel her all warm and trusting and yours...

He stood up and held out his hand. He waited.

She looked up at him.

He saw it, then, knew that she would do whatever he wanted, knew that she wanted him to take her, that she desired him, wanted his touch, his caress, his love…

No more pretense!
said The Rat.
You are what you are. You cannot fight me. You cannot fight yourself.

He took her hand. He walked slowly so that she would have no difficulty keeping up with him.

In front of Sears, he found a green uniformed security guard.

“This is Angie,” Warren said. “I’m afraid her mother’s lost.”

“Happens,” said the security man. “We’ll get her found.”

Angie looked scared as he transferred her hand to the guard’s. She said. “Oh…”

Warren did not permit himself to think about what she meant. Quietly, he said, “It will be okay, Angie. Don’t worry, little girl. Nobody is going to hurt you. Nobody.”

Then, still more quietly, he spoke to her and to himself, “You are all right now.”

A few minutes later, he was driving south on Route 83. The rain had eased up. The radio was playing Brahms’s “Concerto in A for Violin and Cello.”

He listened appreciatively to the intricate interplay of stringed instruments and did not hear the voice of The Rat.

— | — | —

Twenty-Eight

The rainy Sunday afternoon sucked. That was 15-year-old Bobby Smith’s verdict. It sucked the big suck because he was totally bored.

Sometimes Bobby Smith blamed his name for his blah life. Bobby Smith! Wasn’t that about the same as naming your kid “Zero Nobody”? Maybe that was the reason the old man divorced his mom. His father probably wanted to name him something cool, something like D’artagnan or even Spuds, but Mom was Mary Smith, nee, ready for this, Mary Nelson!

No way with a name like Bobby Smith could he be a jock or a nerd. He wasn’t a party animal or a class clown or a brainchild or an airhead or a Trekkie or a preppy. He wasn’t a punker. He wasn’t a stoner or a head-banger; no one ever bothered to approach him about trying or buying dope, so he never even had a chance to say
no
to drugs.

When Bobby Smith wasn’t daydreaming about who he would like to be—kind of a cross between Chuck Norris and any male porn star with 11-plus inches—he saw himself as he was, and that was uncool. He was the goddamned Invisible Man, or, if you want to be technical, the Invisible Sophomore. He was totally anonymous, the guy that nobody notices.

And nobody noticed his absence when he wasn’t there, either.

Yeah, so Sunday was boring and Sunday sucked, but a lot of days were just about the same.

So, what to do, what to do? Might as well jack off. He hadn’t done that for about an hour and a half. He wouldn’t go into the john this time. The old lady was out doing who knows what. And what if she did walk in on him while he was choking the chicken? Probably wouldn’t even notice!

Time for some serious pud-pounding. Definitely.

He got ready. Sitting on the floor in the hallway, spine curved against the wall, he took out his penis. Three facial tissues were ready and waiting.

He picked up the phone and he pushed the touchtone buttons. He put the receiver to his ear, holding it with his shoulder.

He heard one ring. If it was a woman’s voice on the other end, it was A-OK. If it was a guy, click!—and try again until you get lucky.

The digits Bobby Smith had dialed were chosen at random.

You might say it was luck as well as the fiberoptic technology of AT & T that brought him a young-sounding, definitely female “Hello?” You might say it was coincidence.

You might say that—but that’s not what a Gypsy would say. A Gypsy would say that the sequence of numbers beneath Bobby Smith’s fingertip had been dictated by
Baht.

For a Gypsy, there is no coincidence.

There is no chance. All things are as they must be. All events happen as they must happen.

That is the working of fate.

That is
Baht.

In the exact moments before Bobby Smith invaded her life, she was happy—not only happy but, as happens once in a great while, aware that she was happy.

She lay on her bed, lazily gazing at the ceiling. She had on one of her father’s old L. L. Bean chamois shirts, about eight times too big and cuddly and nice, and a pair of blue jeans that were washed out enough to be really comfortable.

There was the murmur of rain on the roof and William Ackerman’s “It Takes a Year” album on the stereo. Ackerman’s solo acoustic guitar sounded like a wispy dream. She’d never really been into the high decibel anger and defiance of Punk music, even though that had been all she played when she had first come—been brought back—home.

William Ackerman’s music was all so mellow, that’s what it was.

And that’s what she was. I am mellow and happy and I’m glad to be me.

Then the telephone on her nightstand rang and she picked it up, wondering if somebody from school had to ask her about the homework.

“Hello?” she said.

There was a moment’s silence. Wrong number, she thought.

And then she knew it was no wrong number.

It wasn’t a voice she recognized, but she subliminally identified the tone of it—and she somehow knew it was coming.

“Hi, baby. Been waiting for me to call? Been waiting for me to give you a nice hot fuck?”

There was a flashback to who she really was!

A feeling of damp and musky rottenness filled her, bubbling up from within her. It seeped out her pores, a slimy, sick sweat on her forehead and in the hollow of her throat.

And there was that disgusting, buzzing, warmth between her thighs.

She could smell herself, that stink aura that never vanished, the stench of the rot inside her.

She was dirty.

And he knew. Whoever he was and what did it matter, he
knew
she was dirty or he would not have called her.

“…my cock. Want to suck my big, hard thing? That what you want?”

“Yes.” She couldn’t keep from answering. “Yes.” It was a hiss. That was the way you talked to men, the way you lured them on, made them come on to you. That was the way you talked when you were never clean but always dirty.

“Cunt. You’re one drippy hot cunt, huh! You’re a real whore. Sucking and fucking. Whore cunt pussy! You want my hard cock in your…”

Whore! That’s what she was…a dirty whore.

Dirty whore! The two words defined her. They were her. Kristin Heidmann, her name, was meaningless. She was wicked, born wicked.

She was the wicked whore cunt evil thing who’d forced her own grandfather, to fuck her, fuck her, dirty whore cunt, whore…

“Hey, you listenin’? Hey, cunt…”

She let the phone drop to the bed and sat up. She put her hand over her mouth. She wanted to throw up, to let everything rotten and vile and dirty come spilling out of her. But she couldn’t vomit and she couldn’t cry, so she simply hung up the receiver and then stood up.

“I am tired of being dirty,” she said aloud. That was it. She no longer felt happy, of course, but nor did she feel bad. There was only a great tiredness a deep weariness, and a powerful and overpowering desire to be clean at last.