The Girl Next Door (23 page)
Like me.
Of course we wrote and directed these mind-films of ours as well as watched them. So I suppose it was inevitable that we add to our cast of characters.
I suppose it was also inevitable that Eddie Crocker be our first audition.
It was a bright sunny morning toward the end of July, three weeks into Meg’s captivity, when I first went over and found him there.
In the few days since the shower they’d let her keep her clothes on—there were blisters and they were allowing them to heal—and they were treating her pretty well all told, feeding her soup and sandwiches, giving her water when she wanted it. Ruth had even put sheets over the air mattress and swept the cigarette butts off the floor. And it was tough to say whether Willie did more complaining about his latest toothache or about how boring things had gotten.
With Eddie, that changed.
She still had her clothes on when I got there—a pair of faded jeans and a blouse—but they had her bound and gagged again, lying on her stomach over the worktable, each arm tied to one of the legs of the table, feet tied together on the floor.
Eddie had one of his Keds off and was pounding her ass.
Then he’d quit for a while and Willie’d work on her back, legs, and rear with a leather belt. They hit her hard. Eddie especially.
Woofer and Donny stood watching.
I watched too. But only briefly.
I didn’t like him there.
Eddie was too much into it.
It was far too easy to picture him walking down the street that day grinning at us with the black-snake between his teeth, flinging it over and over at us until the snake lay dead in the street.
This was the kid who would bite the head off a frog.
This was the kid who would just as soon hit you in the head with a rock or whack you in the balls with a stick as look at you.
Eddie was passionate.
It was hot that day and the sweat rolled off him, streamed out of his close-cut carrot-red hair and down across his forehead. As usual he had his shirt off so we could see his great physique and the smell of his sweat rolled off him too.
He smelled salty and sticky-sweet, like old bad meat.
I didn’t stay.
I went upstairs.
Susan was putting together a jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table. There was a half-empty glass of milk beside her.
The television, for once, was silent. You could hear the slaps and laughter from below.
I asked for Ruth.
Ruth, Susan said, was lying in the bedroom. One of her headaches. She’d been having them a lot lately.
So we sat there saying nothing. I got myself a Budweiser from the fridge. Susan was doing pretty well on the puzzle. She had more than half of it done. The picture was called “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri,” by George Caleb Bingham and showed a grim gnarly old man in a funny pointed cap and a dreamy-faced teenager in a canoe paddling downstream at sunset, a black cat sitting tethered to the prow. She had the edges in and the cat and the canoe and most of the man and boy. There was only the sky and the river and some of the trees left now.
I watched her fit a piece into the river. I sipped the beer.
“So how you doin’?” I asked.
She didn’t look up. “Fine,” she said.
I heard laughter from the shelter.
She tried another piece. It didn’t fit.
“That bother you?” I said. I meant the sounds.
“Yes,” she said. But she didn’t say it as though it did. It was just a fact of life.
“A lot?”
“Uh-huh.”
I nodded. There was nothing much to say then after that. I watched her and drank the beer. Pretty soon she had the boy completed and was working on the trees.
“I can’t make them stop, y’know?” I said.
“I know.”
“Eddie’s there. For one thing.”
“I know.”
I finished the beer.
“I would if I could,” I said. I wondered if it was true. So did she.
“Yes?” she said.
And for the first time she looked up at me, eyes very mature and thoughtful. A lot like her sister’s.
“’Course I would.”
She went back to the puzzle again, frowning.
“Maybe they’ll get tired,” I said, realizing as soon as I said it how lame that sounded. Susan didn’t answer.
But then a moment later the sounds did stop and I heard footsteps come up the stairs.
It was Eddie and Willie. Both of them flushed, shirts open. Willie’s middle a fat, dead-white ugly roll. They ignored us and went to the refrigerator. I watched them crack a Coke for Willie and a Bud for Eddie and then push things around looking for something to eat. I guess there wasn’t much because they closed it again.
“You gotta give it to her,” Eddie was saying. “She don’t cry much. She ain’t chicken.”
If I had felt detached from all this, Eddie was in another realm entirely. Eddie’s voice was like ice. It was Willie who was fat and ugly but it was Eddie who disgusted me.
Willie laughed. “That’s ‘cause she’s all cried out,” he said. “You should’ve seen her after her scrubbin’ the other day.”
“Yeah. I guess. You think we should bring something down for Donny and Woofer?”
“They didn’t ask for nothin’. They want it, let ’em get it.”
“I wish you had some food, man,” said Eddie.
And they started to walk back down. They continued to ignore us. That was fine with me. I watched them disappear down the stairwell.
“So what are you gonna do?” said Eddie. I felt his voice drift up at me like a wisp of toxic smoke. “Kill her?”
I froze.
“Nah,” said Willie.
And then he said something else but the sound of their footsteps on the stairs drowned it out for us.
Kill her? I felt the words slide along my spine.
Somebody walking over my grave,
my mother would say.
Somebody walking over my grave,
my mother would say.
Leave it to Eddie, I thought. Leave it to him.
To state the obvious.
I’d wondered how far it could go, how it could end. Wondered it obscurely, like a mathematical problem.
And here was the unimaginable quietly imagined, two kids discussing it, a Coke and a beer in hand.
I thought of Ruth lying in the bedroom with her sick headache.
I thought of how they were down there all alone with her now—with Eddie with them.
It could happen. Yes it could.
It could happen fast. Almost by accident.
It didn’t occur to me to wonder why I still equated Ruth with supervision. I just did.
She was still an adult, wasn’t she?
Adults couldn’t let that happen, could they?
I looked at Susan. If she’d heard what Eddie’d said she gave no sign. She worked on the puzzle.
Hands trembling, afraid to listen and just as scared not to, I worked with her.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Eddie was there every day after that for about a week. On the second day his sister Denise came too. Together they force-fed her crackers, which she couldn’t really eat because the gag had been on overnight again and they’d denied her water. Eddie got mad and smacked her across the mouth with an aluminum curtain rod, bending the rod and leaving a broad red welt across her cheek, cutting her lower lip.
The rest of the day they played tackle dummy again.
Ruth was hardly ever there. Her headaches came more and more frequently now. She complained about her skin itching, particularly her face and hands. It seemed to me she’d lost weight. A fever blister appeared on her lip and stayed for days. Even with the TV on you could always hear her coughing upstairs, deep down into her lungs.
With Ruth not around the prohibition against touching Meg disappeared.
Denise was the one who started it. Denise liked to pinch. She had strong fingers for a girl her age. She would take Meg’s flesh and twist it, commanding her to cry. Most of the time Meg wouldn’t cry. That made Denise try harder. Her favorite targets were Meg’s breasts—you could tell because she saved them for last.
And then, usually, Meg would cry.
Willie liked to drape her over the table, pull down her pants and smack her bottom.
Woofer’s thing was insects. He’d put a spider or a thousand-legger on her belly and watch her cringe.
It was Donny who surprised me. Whenever he thought that no one was looking he’d run his hands across her breasts or squeeze them slightly or feel her between her legs. I saw him plenty of times but I never let on.
He did it gently, like a lover. And once when the gag was off I even saw him kiss her. It was an awkward kiss but sort of tender and strangely chaste when you consider that he had her there to do anything he wanted to her.
Then Eddie came in laughing one day with a dog turd in a plastic cup and they held her down over the table while Woofer pinched her nostrils until she had to open her mouth to breathe and Eddie slipped it in. And that was the last time anybody kissed her.
On Friday that week I had been working in the yard all afternoon until about four o’clock, and when I went over I could hear the radio blaring from the back-door landing, so I went down and saw that the group had expanded again.
Word had gotten around.
Not only were Eddie and Denise there but Harry Gray, Lou and Tony Morino, Glenn Knott and even Kenny Robertson—a dozen people crowded into that tiny shelter counting Meg and me—and Ruth was standing in the doorway watching, smiling as they shouldered and elbowed her back and forth between them like a human pinball caught between a dozen human flippers.
Her hands were tied behind her.
There were beer cans and Cokes on the floor. Cigarette smoke hung over the room in thick gray drifting clouds. At some point the radio played an old Jerry Lee Lewis tune, “Breathless,” and everybody laughed and started singing.
It ended with Meg on the floor, bruised and sobbing. We trooped upstairs for refreshments.
My movie kept rolling.
Kids came and went after that all that following week. Usually they did nothing but watch, but I remember Glen Knott and Harry Gray making her into what they called a “sandwich” one day—when Ruth wasn’t around—rubbing against her from front and back while she hung from the lines suspended from the nails in the beams across the ceiling. I remember Tony Morino bringing Woofer half a dozen garden slugs to put all over her body.
But unless it hurt, Meg was usually quiet now. After the dogshit incident it was hard to humiliate her. And not much could scare her. She seemed resigned. As though maybe all she had to do was wait and maybe we’d all get bored by this eventually and it would pass. She rarely rebelled. If she did we’d just call in Susan. But most of the time it didn’t come to that. She’d climb out of or into her clothes pretty much on command now. Out of only when we knew Ruth wasn’t going to be around or if Ruth herself suggested it, which wasn’t very often.
And much of the time we just sat there around the worktable, playing cards or Clue and drinking Cokes or looking through magazines, talking, and it was like Meg wasn’t even there at all except that we’d say something to mock or shame her now and then. Abuse that was casual and ordinary. Her presence compelled us in much the same passive way a trophy did—she was the centerpiece of our clubhouse. We spent most of our time there. It was the middle of summer but we were all getting pasty from sitting in the cellar. Meg just sat or stood there bound and silent, and mostly we asked nothing of her. Then maybe somebody would get an idea—a new way to use her—and try it out.
But basically it looked like maybe she was right. Maybe we’d just get bored one day and stop coming. Ruth seemed preoccupied with herself and her various physical ailments—preoccupied, strange and distant. And without her to feed the flames our attentions toward Meg got more and more sporadic, less intense.
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