The Orphan (29 page)

“No. Thanks, Flossie.” Charles looked up, straight into her eyes so that she laughed. “You’re a really good friend.” He finished his pie, noticed her hand was still on his arm and felt a warmth rising in him again. “Hey, why don’t we walk home, to your house, I mean? It’s a nice night.”

When they were out of sight of the school and had left behind the two younger boys Charles had had to threaten with a beating, they reached out and held hands until they were almost to the railroad tracks. Charles recognized the area. Over there, across the tracks and under that tree, was where he had pushed over Alfred’s car, or rather, the Beast had pushed it over. He felt disoriented for a moment and stopped. Flossie misunderstood as they stood there in the dark moonless night with the bright stars in a clear black sky, and she turned to him, taking his other hand, and she kissed him on the mouth with soft lips, just touching his lower lip with her tongue. In an instant, Charles felt as though he were on fire, all memories and thoughts lost from his mind. He closed his arms around Flossie’s slender body, cupping her head with his left hand, and they kissed long and earnestly until they were both breathless.

“Wow, Charles,” Flossie said. “You haven’t changed. Or maybe you’ve got better.” She rubbed his back, arching her body up to his so that his pulses pounded in a dozen separate places in his body. “Yes,” she said, moving her abdomen against him, “lots better.”

They broke apart and walked to the grass under the tree where the car had been turned over back in October, and in spite of the grass being wet, they lay down together.

I am rising to be with Charles now with such pleasant sensations available to us both. The blood carries us both to an ascending tenseness that I recognize now. Charles knows I am here, but he feels I will not interfere, as it is for our mutual pleasure. I help him exert some will as the young woman seems not to object to our going on, to doing more things with her body as she wriggles and caresses Charles’s head and neck. The sensations are becoming exquisite, almost unbearable for us both now as the caresses become more intimate and the young people begin to tear at each others’ clothing. A great need is building up, and I must exert all my will not to shift and break this moment. I must be content to go with the boy here, for it will not be possible for me with the woman. She would be terrified, and the sensations would not continue. I hold to the body of Charles while I feel his mind slipping back as I push forward and apply more force to make the woman go on with this act.

Now we are near, the boy’s body quivering with excitement as he searches for the way to do this thing we have never done. I am loosing my hold so as to feel it all more fully. But what is happening? The woman is crying out and trying to get away. I regain my hold and she stops, lies quiet for a moment but is no longer trying to make it pleasurable. Again we approach the consummation of this act, and I must let go again as the flood of pleasure bears me away from the scene, but again she is struggling.

“No, Charles, no! Please, Charles, not all the way. Oh please, Charles, I don’t know why I let you go this far.” She was crying uncontrollably now, trying to get out of the boy’s grip that was like steel on her body. But then he stopped. “Oh please, please,” she cried, her eyes filled with tears, but still holding to Charles’s body with her arms.

Charles came to himself, found himself so near the goal of his lustful fantasies that for a second or so he believed he was in a dream again, and then he saw Flossie’s terrified eyes, knew where his hands were and what he was about to do, and he drew back, wrenching himself off the girl’s body with a painful cry. He lay rigid on the ground, his groin in pain with the agony of unsatisfied lust.

I am coming back into Charles’s sensations again, and I cannot understand why the boy and girl have stopped. It is a terrible frustration that we feel, a bad sensation that I can savor but do not particularly enjoy. They are not going to continue. I feel rage beginning, but it is not a time for me to appear, and I must ride my own disappointment for the moment. This should not happen. It is not a good feeling.

“Flossie,” Charles said, his teeth gritted. “I’m sorry, I don’t know. I got too excited. I’m sorry.”

The slender girl, only a shadow in the dark, pulled her skirt down and lay down beside Charles, putting her arm over him, saying next to his ear, “It’s all right, all right. I know, Charles. I want to, but we can’t, but oh, Charles, I really want to.” And she began to cry harder now while Charles lay on his back looking up at the star filled sky and felt the blood calming gradually to a bearable level again. He was thinking that he could not allow this to happen again, that these situations must be avoided, since the power would sometime force the act to a conclusion, and he would be guilty of violating some poor girl who could not resist him. He felt tears in his eyes at the utter frustration of it, the inability to control his own life, the constant lust he felt, and the terrible and immediate sickness that made his stomach churn and ache and his leg muscles knot and release.

When they could walk steadily, they went on across the field in a short cut so as not to meet anyone else. At the Portolas’ gate, Charles and Flossie held each other in a long kiss, but just as the sensations began to build up again, the girl broke away and ran for the house. Charles heard her cry back to him a good night, and she was gone. He ran for awhile, cutting back through fields, avoiding the roads and lanes, hating the Beast, the monster that he felt so close to him now that he could almost feel the hot, predatory breath in his ear, seeming so real and present beside him that when it spoke in his mind he jumped.

“Charles, I believe that what you call the monster and the hero are the same thing.”

“They’re not,” Charles said aloud into the spring darkness. “You’re strong and clever, like a bear or a weasel, but you don’t care about being good and honorable because you aren’t human.”

“We are the same creature, Charles. We stand in the same space, breathe the same air, eat the same food.”

The boy stopped, his smooth face wrinkled into a frown of disgust. “I don’t eat raw meat,” he said. “I don’t make dogs howl at night and people run away scared of my shadow, and I’m not a monster that will go around taking advantage of a poor girl just because she’s all hot and bothered.”

“I take what I need. It is right to do this.”

“You’d do it to anybody. You wanted to do it to Mrs. Lanphier that night in the blizzard.” He stopped, ashamed of the memory.

“These females wanted to do the sexual act with you - and with me,” it said from inside him, although the voice seemed at his ear, almost a breath he could feel, warmer than the warm night air. He began walking again, hearing the real rush of night breeze in his ears.

“You don’t know what it is to be human,” Charles said at last. “You could never be courageous or heroic or be really in love because you’re not human.”

“I recognize that you are trying to insult me, Charles,” the voice said softly. “But I do not wish to be human any more than you want to be me - but it is necessary. We are together, and we share the same emotions. You are making us uncomfortable for no reason.”

“It’s my own reason,” Charles said. He could see the light in the schoolhouse far across the fields seeming to blink on and off as distant trees came between him and the light. “It’s a human reason,” he said, almost saying “heroic” for “human,” knowing that he felt larger and more manly when he pulled away from what he wanted, denied himself that ultimate pleasure that the Beast was talking about.

“But you can’t just maker me disappear, Charles,” the Beast said, softly, insistently. “We are together, one creature.”

Charles had walked into the open now, seeing the schoolhouse lights like a beacon across the clear, dark fields. He felt the uprush of hopelessness that always came over him like a chill when he realized that. The Beast was right. There was only one creature. He would never stand beside that huge, fearsome thing, look at it except in a mirror as he had that one time, run from it in fear or leave it behind. It was himself. No, he corrected, feeling a weakness in his arms and legs, he was part of It. As he went forward across the plowed furrows he saw the schoolhouse lights go out, the outline of the six tall windows disappearing into the background of night as if they had never been. She had closed up, then, and would be walking out now, up the cinder lane to her little room at the Peaussier farm.

He almost swerved off to the right to walk through the stand of trees and get home when he realized he had left the plaque. Miss Wrigley would be terribly disappointed if he didn’t think enough of it to even take it home. He broke into a trot and made for the school, running harder now, thinking that if he caught her just going out the gate he could apologize and get the plaque. But he could not make good time across the freshly plowed fields, and he glimpsed a walking figure heading out the school gate and down the cinder road toward the farm a quarter of a mile farther on. He slowed to a walk, panting and keeping up a good pace, but not sure why he was still going on. She would be home in a few minutes, and it would be too late, and he certainly didn’t want to be jumping out of the dark and scaring her. But he walked on, some obscure reason making itself in his mind, or perhaps he was not thinking at all, but did not want to go home.

Strangely, as he followed the dimly seen form of Miss Wrigley, she in the center of the cinder road, he behind her and on the field side of the fence, he felt no particular motive. Rather, he felt it was play. He was a detective, and she was a suspect he had to shadow, because ... But that was silly, he thought, picking his way carefully so as to keep one of the roadside trees between him and the woman in case she turned around. I don’t want to scare her, he thought. She was almost to the Peaussier farm lane, and Charles could hear some animal in or near the barn grunting in a painful way. It was a long, heaving grunt with a little squeak at the end. He stopped, puzzled at what it could be, and then remembered Runt talking about Mrs. Peaussier’s little Jersey being, as he called it “hot for the bull,” but that they would not breed the Jersey to their Holstein bull, so the bull was wearing himself out with the smell of hot cow in his nose day and night. Charles had a moment of deep and inarticulate sympathy for the old bull out there grunting in the dark.

When he looked again, Miss Wrigley had disappeared into the Peaussier farmhouse. Charles felt itchy, his stomach felt separated into four tight parts, and his groin felt as though it had been kneaded in a cement mixer. For a minute he stopped, turned about and almost started across the field for home. But he did not take the first step. Instead he turned again and continued on, crossing the last fence that took him into the Peaussier’s garden plot and brought the two dogs out silently to see who he was. He got down on his knees and talked to them so they recognized him and wagged their tails. He had been at the farm many times, walking home with Miss Wrigley and talking right up to the back door, sometimes standing in the cold until both their feet were numb, talking about faraway cities and mathematics and poetry.

She had never invited him in, of course, for she was a maiden school teacher, and he was a growing young man, and the Peaussiers were silent but watchful. She boarded with them, living in their upstairs room over the back porch as her predecessor had done before her. The Peaussiers were a stoical bunch who worked the soil like peasants, kept their family at home as long as they could, and had all the virtues of thrift and economy their ancestors had practiced in the Old Country. Charles had seen Mr. Peaussier and his youngest son, who was out of high school and living at home, but he had never exchanged a word with them. He had on occasion seen Miss Wrigley bundled into their old touring car, going into town on a Saturday morning. She with her lively smile and waving hand, packed among the straight and silent Peaussiers like a living woman among a load of hickory fence posts.

The dogs knew him. He walked through the garden plot in the dark, hoping he wouldn’t step into some newly dug pit or on some boards with nails in them. It was that dark. He watched the outline of the buildings that surrounded the backyard and saw the sudden soft illumination when a lamp was lighted in an upstairs back window. Miss Wrigley was in her bedroom. Charles moved through the barnyard as if he had a purpose, slid past the crib and the milk house as if he knew what he was doing, but he was not actually thinking at all. He moved as if in a movie of himself that he could not remember, as if it was all planned out beforehand and needed no thought. Now he could see the window, the swept back lace curtains and the shade pulled almost to the sill. He watched the illuminated shade and was rewarded by a shadow that moved across it.

There was a trellis at one end of the porch, but it was made of little half inch strips that would not have held a monkey. The porch pillar at the other end, he thought, slipping off his shoes, and the drainpipe, if it didn’t come loose, would make one big step to the roof of the porch. He pulled his socks off, stepped up on the porch and onto the railing, going very carefully in case some of the wood might be rotten. But no part of the Peaussier place was allowed to be rotten. All was strong, newly painted, firmly nailed, as was the iron strap that held the down spout. The roof was gritty, but not too slanting, and now the narrow slot of light at the bottom of the shade was just ahead of him. He crawled on his stomach up to the window sill and peered through that slot. At first he didn’t see her, and his heart gave a great jump. What if he had made a noise and old man Peaussier was coming out with his shotgun? But just as he was about to back down away from the window, she came back from somewhere, perhaps the toilet, since the Peaussiers had an indoor bathroom. She was dressed in the dark, shiny dress she had worn at the PTA meeting. He watched as she put some things away in a desk and then stood at a closet unbuttoning the dress down the front.

Charles was so absorbed in watching this entirely new aspect of Miss Wrigley’s life that he was almost unaware that his body was beginning to react in two distinct ways: fear and lust. His heart thumped against the porch roof so hard that someone standing under him might have heard it, and sweat ran down into his ears even though the night was turning cool, and his hands on the gritty roofing quivered as if in palsy. Miss Wrigley had hung the dress in the closet and taken a long white nightgown out and laid it across the bed. Then she disappeared again for a moment, came back with a book, threw it on the bed, moved the lamp to the night stand, and finished undressing. Charles had never seen an adult naked woman except in certain ragged, smuggled pictures Carl had loaned to Douglas. He was suddenly galvanized with emotions pulling him in two directions. He could not tear his eyes away from the woman as she bent to remove her underwear, and as she straightened up, tossing the underthings into a hamper, he felt an intense shame wash over him. He looked at her body, the naked, helpless wonian’s body, the round breasts and belly and the black vee of pubic hair and the rounded hips, and then he looked at the calm face as she rubbed the red mark on her belly where something had been too tight, scratched the outsides of her thighs where there were more red marks, and as naturally as if she were always in a nude state, reached for the nightgown and slipped it over her head so that it slithered down like a white cotton curtain falling on the night’s performance. And the calm face was Miss Wrigley’s face, a loved face that had nurtured him in learning, that had cared about him as much as any person on earth had cared for him, a loved person whom he had just betrayed in a hideous way by sneaking to her window to watch her undress. The shaking was all over his body now, and he could not imagine moving, trying to get down off the wretched height to which he had climbed for such a purpose. His guts ached, and he hated the throbbing in his groin and the painful erection that had come back again. He moved one foot to try to turn away and, still looking at the woman’s face through the lace curtain, saw her flinch, her eyes widen as she looked toward the window. She had heard him. He dared not move.