Thief (19 page)

I didn’t owe anyone anything, I told myself. Not the cowboy and not Breville. Especially not Breville.

After I napped most of the afternoon on the dock, I rode my bike partway around the lake. I went past the place Merle called
“the scar,” which was a steep lake lot where the owners had cut away all the trees between their house and the lake so they
could have a view and a big sand beach. If Merle was really riled up, he called it “the goddamn scar upon the land” and couldn’t
stop cursing.

“They took out every living thing,” Merle said when he explained the history of the place to me. “Except that all those trees
and all the brush they chopped out were holding the slope in place. Now it’s falling into the lake. Goddamn fools.”

Even though I never saw the lot before the trees had been cut, it was plain enough why Merle was upset. The house itself was
large and gleaming white, and with its trucked-in sand and lack of vegetation, the entire place stood out from the rest of
the heavily treed lakeshore. But that was the way it was done up here sometimes. I often spotted lots and tracts that had
been logged, and they were almost always clear-cut, with nothing left but broken trunks and slash. Garbage.

I didn’t know what made the next idea come into my mind, but standing there with one foot down on the ground and the other
still on the pedal of my bike, I thought, that’s what a rape was like. A clear-cut. All experiences removed except the rape.
It seemed like a powerful image, and for a moment I stood there, thinking about it.

Then I rejected it.

A woman’s body, my body, wasn’t a forest, and what ever damage
I experienced as a result of my rape was exactly that: pain from an act of violence that had nothing to do with me. Someone
fucked me and bit me until he tore my skin, and I didn’t want to use any other words for it. What ever else my life was, it
was not a clear-cut.

I thought about that as I pedaled away from the scar, but in a little while the thought itself dissipated in the tiny breeze
I made as I rode, there beside the lake.

THE NEXT DAY
was windy and rainy, only in the fifties, and I shivered the three blocks from the parking lot to the door of Stillwater
prison. I’d stopped at the rest area in Rogers on the way into the Cities to fix my hair and take off my panties, and now
I was wearing just a fancy corset with garters and no crotch. The thing had stiff ribbing in it to hold my breasts up and
out, and all the way down the street I was hoping the ribbing was plastic so I didn’t set off the metal detector with underwires.

But I didn’t set off the detector, and just like every other time, after they announced “Visit for Breville,” I got to pass
into the small, locked holding cell, and through the second locking door, and into the visiting room and toward Breville.
When we embraced in the taped-off square, he quickly ran his hands down my sides, but I didn’t know if he could feel the end
of the corset or not.

“You smell good, as always,” he said into my hair, and then we were pulling apart.

The room had a few people in it, just the way Breville promised it would— enough people for the guards to monitor but not
so many as to make us feel crowded. As I sat down, I used the motion of arranging my dress to slip open another button.

“So, tell me about this new job,” Breville said as he watched my fingers. “Why do you need a change?”

“I don’t want to be in the Cities anymore,” I said. “I want to do something different.”

“Aren’t you going to miss things?”

“I don’t think so. I haven’t missed anything this summer.”

“You know I can’t call you up there. I can’t pay for it.”

“You can call me collect.”

“I don’t like that. I never have. It makes me feel bad not to be able to pay for my calls.”

“I’ll visit. At least on the weekends. We’ll talk then. I need to be up there,” I said.

As I said that, he opened his legs and then brought them together again and began to bounce one leg up and down. I doubted
that either one of us had paid any attention to the things we’d just said— the real thing going on between us, and the only
thing, was there between Breville’s legs and mine. The words we said were just noise.

“Are you nervous?” I said, and looked at his bouncing leg.

“Just waiting. Anticipation.”

I knew it was my cue, but something in me felt scared: not so much of showing Breville my little-girl bareness, but of being
caught.

But I did it. I opened my legs. Breville slouched down in his chair and looked, and I opened my legs even farther when he
leaned down to retie his shoelace. He looked at me a long time, and then returned to slouching. In a little while he bent
down to retie the other shoe.

He studied my vulva the way I had studied his face the first time I came to see him.

When he sat back up, he looked down at his lap and then at my eyes and then back down at his cock. I looked at his jeans and
I
could see the mounded fabric. His erection wasn’t obvious— it could have just been the denim and the way he was sitting— but
he looked thick. Swollen. When I looked back at his face to meet his eyes, though, he had turned away. When he turned back
to face me, he looked upset.

“Are you happy?” I said. “To see me today?”

“Of course I am.”

“You don’t seem happy.”

“I’m happy.”

“Okay. I guess I’ll believe you.”

“I don’t know. What do you want me to say? It depresses me.”

“What does?”

“You know. It just depresses me to see it.”

It took me a few seconds, but then I understood. I understood what he had just said, and I drew my legs together. Not that
he saw— he was still looking away from me. Looking around the visiting room to see who else was there, who he could flash
a hand sign to, looking for Gates. I didn’t know.

But that was the power men and boys had. They could say your vagina smelled and made their fingers stink, or that good pussy
didn’t just lie there. They could say your cunt depressed them.

We sat silently for a while and then Breville said, “Is it pierced?”

When I shook my head no, he said, “I thought I saw metal.”

“Maybe it was a garter.”

“Well, at least you can tell it’s shaved,” he said. “Did you ever think about getting it pierced?”

“No. I never thought about it.”

“Maybe you’d like it. It would probably be exciting.”

“Maybe,” I said, but it didn’t matter. He was hardly looking at me. I’d served it up to him on a platter, and he’d already
lost interest.

Yet what exactly did I expect? Breville might have stopped
drinking in prison and he might have been prevented from hurting anyone else, but on some level he was still the same damaged
person he’d been when he raped. He didn’t get healthier in prison. He didn’t want to lose himself in the animal wetness of
my body. He wanted to shave it and pierce it. Puncture and slice it.

We talked awhile longer, but I couldn’t make myself stay the two hours we were allotted. After some desultory story Breville
managed to come up with, I told him I needed to head out. Back to the cabin. Back home.

“They’re predicting storms,” I said.

“I haven’t seen lightning in seven years,” he told me. “Never thought I’d miss it, but I do.”

“It’s still the same,” I said. “It still lights up the sky.”

“I even miss snow,” Breville said. “What do you think of that? I wouldn’t even mind shoveling some, you know?”

It was a repeat of something he’d written in a letter. I smiled at him but didn’t say anything, and then we stood up to walk
over to the taped-off square.

For the last time, I said goodbye to Breville in front of the guard. He passed his hand over my hip and ass but this time
I didn’t feel any burning. Just the touch of his hand. What had I wanted from him, really? And I thought, if I couldn’t count
on sexual interest from a rapist, then who?

Bare-pussied and cold, I wondered that the whole way home.

WHEN I GOT HOME
to the cabin, the worst of the wind had died down, so I went for a swim. There was nothing else to do.

The water was warmer than the air, so once I was in, it felt like any other summer day. I swam a hundred feet out and then
started going back and forth, back and forth. I didn’t have words for the lowness I felt. I felt ridiculous. Was ridiculous.

I wondered if Frank L—— even knew he’d raped me. It probably just seemed like a fuck to him. He’d been stoned, drinking. Even
though I cried, I didn’t know if it really registered with him. And even though he asked me once if my cunt hurt, my answer
meant nothing to him, because he went on fucking me. And I fucked him back, at least for a time. And even if he was aware
of what he did that night, I was sure he didn’t think of me the way I thought of him— weekly, maybe almost daily— for the
past seventeen years. What faithfulness I had to him. But I doubted he remembered my name.

As I swam, I thought about the other thing I never told anyone about my rape. I always thought I kept it a secret because
I was ashamed of my actions. I was, but I also didn’t tell anyone because I figured no one would ever believe or understand
what I did.

One day, about a month after I was raped, I still felt low and flat and blank. The day was cool and gray, and all I wanted
to do was sleep. Every time I felt myself drifting into sleep and entering the shell of a dream, though, the neighbor’s dog
began to bark. The barking brought me back to the gray day and my cold room. The dog woke me three times, and after the third
time, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep the day away. I didn’t know what to do instead, but then something in me did know,
and I took off the pale blue nightgown I was sleeping in and I got dressed.

He was often at Ty Kintzel’s house— or so I judged because I knew his truck and often saw it parked there by the canal. The
entire town was a corral where people were penned.

When Ty Kintzel opened the door, I nodded at him.

“He here?”

Kintzel didn’t answer but motioned me in and pulled the door closed behind me. The hallway was dark and we walked back to
the living room.

Kintzel had to say Keil’s name to get him to look up from the television, which was blaring. The place reeked, so I knew the
two of them had been sitting there and smoking and smoking. Some game was on. Keil looked up when he heard Ty, and that was
the only time he looked at me. It was the first time I’d seen him since he held me for Frank, and it wasn’t until I saw his
face that I really knew what I had come for. I thought if I could say I wanted a piece of what had happened, or if I could
say I’d wanted Keil and wanted him still, it would make the other night something I controlled.

Keil Ward looked at me for a moment, and then he told Ty, “I already been there. I guess it’s your turn.” Then he went back
to watching TV.

Kintzel looked at me and I looked back. He was all right: over six feet tall, brown hair. A little gone to fat. I knew he
went with a
girl who had been a couple years ahead of me in school. Yvette Cameron.

Kintzel said, “Sit down.”

So I did. The three of us passed a joint for a while. Or rather, Kintzel passed it to me and took it back from me, then passed
it over to Keil. After a while, Ty Kintzel said to me, “Do you want to see the rest of the house?” and I knew he had decided.

When we got to the bedroom, I guess he still thought he had to talk me into something. He said to me, “That shirt you got
on— it gets me excited.”

I pulled it off . Then I took off my bra so he could see my breasts, envy of Cheryl Korr.

We didn’t talk after that.

When Kintzel put his face between my legs, I let him. I was all done with my medication, and the tiny tears in my skin had
healed. After a little while I pulled at Kintzel’s shoulders until he moved up over me and got inside. I kept looking at the
wallpaper in the room, at the dark furniture, which looked like it came from someone’s grandmother. I put my hands on Kintzel’s
back for a second, and then took them away. It was a gentle fuck. I hardly felt his dick moving into me.

The whole thing took a few minutes. Right before the end, Kintzel gave me a few extra strokes.

“That’s for you,” he said.

After he rolled off me, I stuck my hands down between my legs and, sure enough, I found that slipperiness. I hadn’t felt him
come.

I was dressed before Kintzel. When I opened the bedroom door, he was still sitting there on the bed, tying his laces.

“I had a good time,” he said. “Thanks.”

“I had a good time, too,” I said.

Before I walked out of that house, I looked once more at Keil
Ward, at the side of his face as he sat watching TV. He didn’t seem like the person who had flirted with me all those months,
and he didn’t seem like the person who had watched as someone else fucked me. He didn’t seem like anyone. I had come to Keil
Ward again because I’d wanted something from him, wanted to settle something from that night, and it was just my luck that
he didn’t want to fuck me. Just my luck. But I didn’t let myself think about that. I kept moving to the door.

When I got outside, my eyes felt like they were far back in my head and I knew I was miles away from my body. Ty Kintzel’s
come had canceled out Frank L——’s. I’d thought I needed Keil Ward, since he had been there that night, but as it turned out,
what Kintzel had done was empty enough for me. It got the job done.

I never told anyone about what I’d done the day I went looking for Keil Ward because I didn’t think they would understand
how it brought things back to nil. But it made perfect sense to me then, and it made perfect sense to me still. I didn’t get
stuck in my rape. Or maybe I did get stuck, but not in the same way I would have if I hadn’t kept touching people, or letting
them touch me. If I hadn’t kept spreading my legs.

But maybe if I had told people how I hunted down Keil Ward— or how, when he turned me away, I found a substitute quarry and
replacement cock— it would have helped them understand what kind of person I was. Maybe it would have kept them from seeing
me as a victim. For instance, when Richaux and I used to be fucking or getting ready to fuck, he sometimes told me he could
feel scars. “They make me think of that other night,” he’d tell me, even when I hadn’t been thinking of it at all, when I’d
been enjoying his fingers or his cock inside me.