Stacking in Rivertown (14 page)

I return to the hall, wandering into a bathroom. I swoop the flashlight over the toilet, bathtub, sink. I open the medicine cabinet. Inside, I find a pharmacopoeia.

I peruse the bottles and pocket a large bottle half full of Valium. I’m sad to see that the codeine is almost empty. I pocket it anyway.

Out in the hall again, I hit the next bedroom. This room is different. A kite hangs from the ceiling. Some stuffed animals are huddled together on the pillow of the bed like I’ve frightened them. I’m getting a bad feeling now. I think I smell Ben’s basement. I see a picture on the dresser and pick it up.

It’s of a girl who could be a young me swinging a bat. I take it and lie down on the bed, trying to get a feel for the room. My eyes start drooping as I gaze up at the kite, then over at some shelves.

I freeze. Then I shine my light there.

For God’s sakes, there’s the doll’s head big as you please with one eye popped out. A toupee drapes over its horrifyingly pink head. Next to it is a cup. I jump off the bed and reach up, taking it down. It’s a cup with a dragon on the side curling around. There’s a woman with a parasol and tiny feet.

God, I feel bad now, like all of me is going to water or something. I sit in a chair nearby and lose my balance, falling backward. Clutching at the desk, I knock off a jar of pens and pencils.

I lie still on the floor. Voices murmur and a light goes on. I roll over and crouch behind the bed. Dave/Snuff pads down the hall, looking this way and that.

“Be careful, dear,” Betty says. He stomps downstairs checking the house. Now I hear Betty’s feet whisper along the floor. She pushes the door to this room open farther and flips on the light, seeing the chair that fell back. I watch her looking in the door, and it comes back to me all in a flash, the look on her face years ago when this was my bedroom.

She had opened this door in almost the same way. At first she looked concerned, then confused, then she went a cold, cruel white. She looked at me direct in the eyes, hate shining not at Dave, for God’s sakes. She hated me.

She shut the door and left me alone with him, the anesthesiologist, pumping up and down on top of me.

A baby, I think. A fucking baby. Fucking Dave got me pregnant.

But this time, in the present, Betty sees me crouching and screams. I leap up and whip out my gun, pointing it at her. She freezes.

Yep. It ’s the same Betty that used to come with her goddamn redhots. She’s older and thinner, but I bet she has a closetful of white shoes.

My head is reeling, and for the first time, it all makes sense about Betty visiting us by the river years ago and Mama and her not getting along. This bitch is my goddamn mother.

Sometimes I can be very dense.

Dave comes barreling up the stairs and stops dead when he sees me. I want to shoot them both. I want to pour gasoline over them and light a match. I want to be Ben for just one hour.

We stand there, all three of us frozen. Finally, good old “take charge of everything including your stepdaughter” Dave clears his throat.

“What do you want?” he says. “We’ll give you money.”

That’s right, throw money at the situation. That should fix it. Betty and Dave should get together with Ben instead of Jeremy. They could swap stories about screwing me.

I then remember that I have on the ski mask. How smart of me.

“Back to your bedroom.” I wave my gun at them.

They back off, edging toward the bedroom. I pick up my gym bag and follow. Once in the master bedroom, I wave them toward the bed, feeling Ben well up in me.

“You,” I say to Dave. “Lie facedown on the bed.”

Betty’s crying now. I get out the duct tape and throw it at Betty. “Tape his wrists behind his back. Tape his ankles.”

It takes her awhile as she whimpers. I check her work to make sure it’s tight.

“Now you,” I say. “Lie down beside him. Same way.”

She does this, weeping like a train. I tape her the same way. In a moment of malice, I tape Dave’s eyes, thinking of what it will do to his face.

“Lots of money,” he says. “I can get you lots of money.”

“Oh shut up, shithead.”

Perusing the room, I see that on the dresser there are a whole bunch of pictures lined up in neat rows. Keeping my eye on the happy couple, I ease over and browse the pictures. Betty and Dave. Betty and Dave. My supposed sister. Then a picture of the supposed me. I pick it up and walk over to the bed, sticking it in Betty’s face.

Did you love her? I ask.

She’s still crying.

Of course I loved her. She was my baby.

But you left her, I say. You left her to Dave. You let him screw her. How often? Once a week? Twice a day?

No, she wails. No.

Dave, I say, strolling around the bed. What was she like? Was she a really good screw? Is that why you did her like that?

What do you know? he yells. You don’t know shit.

I want to bust him over the head.

But I do, Dave, I say. I knew her. She told me all about you. That’s why I came. To let you know that somebody knows what you did to her. I loved her something awful. It was you chased her into that river.

I put the muzzle up to his head. He goes still.

No, Betty cries. No.

I stay there. I wait. I’m so good at waiting.

Tell the truth, Dave. You screwed her, didn’t you?

His lips tremble. I push the muzzle against his temple harder.

Yes, he says.

It was your baby she had, wasn’t it?

Yes .

Are you going to talk to the press anymore, telling them lies?

No.

I wait, wanting to pull the trigger, wishing, wishing, wishing that I could.

Why can’t I ever pull the trigger?

I go back to the dresser and see a picture that stops my heart. It’s Mama. It’s fat old Mama and me sitting in a swing. I look to be five or six.

I take the picture over to Betty. Who’s this?

That’s Mama, she says. And Terri.

Terri. Hearing her say it like that gives me a jolt. That was my name back then, before Ben beat it out of me.

She raised Terri, she says. Mama took care of Terri and James Vincent, my son from a different marriage. I got Terri back when she was twelve.

Mama, I think. A picture of Mama.

Why then? Why when she was twelve?

The house burned down. The kids got out. Mama died.

She burned up, I say. Roasted alive.

What’s this to you? shouts Dave. Who are you?

I pick up the tape, jogging around the bed, and rip a piece off, slapping it over Dave’s incestuous mouth.

I told you to shut up. You’re lucky I don’t slice off your prick.

I look at the picture again and want to start crying. Slipping it into the front of my jeans, I pace back to the dresser. I hold up my gym bag and push all the pictures into it.

What about your boy. James?

He ran off when I came to get him.

I start shaking. The whole event is beginning to clobber me.

You’ve got photo albums, don’t you?

Yes, Betty says. Over there on the shelves.

I walk over and find three hefty volumes. I dump these into my bag.

I don’t want to read about this in the paper, I say. I don’t want to find out you’ve been fucking lying to the media again. I’ll come back. I’ll send friends that hate you even more than I do. (Now I’m sounding like a deranged five-year-old.)

Betty whimpers.

I back out of the room but stop in my old bedroom, picking up the cup, the doll’s head, and the toupee. I race out of that house, thinking I should have poured it over with gas. I should have lit a match. I should have watched it go up in flames.

By four in the morning, I finally find my way back to the highway. Lucky for me (or unlucky, depending on your perspective), there’s a twenty-four-hour liquor store at the interchange. I decide to break out of my rhythm and go for a bottle of tequila.

Then I hook on to I-75 and follow it north to I-70, stopping after about an hour of driving. I take a room at a hotel named, of all things, El Rancho. At this point, I’ve devoured a third of my tequila.

I lug my gym bag and duffel bag into my room, and a few guns just in case I need them. I think I start going through the pictures, though I’m not sure. By the time the tequila is near gone, I swallow the bottle of Valium. I would have taken the codeine too if I’d been able to manage it.

Kat and the boys stopped coming to me. The ghosts pressed in. I twitched. I followed them with my eyes.

Now Ben came. He let my hands and legs go. He made love to me. I was starved for touch and craved his presence, his watery voice and body.

He began to teach me by feel. Touch this here. Stroke like that. Now wait. Pay attention to the body. This with the tongue, that with the fingers.

Ben kept me blind, still gagged most of the time unless he wanted me to use my mouth. When he went away, it was a torture for me. But now, he left my arms and legs free, forbidding me to touch the tape at my eyes or the gag. I lay obedient and filled with such a pressure of constant arousal that my thighs wept for his touch.

Then there was nothing. No one came.

I hummed all Mama’s songs. I talked and talked, jerking from the pinching ghost fingers.

At first I didn’t know. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t the ghosts that had gotten me to my feet. And they were pushing me, but I couldn’t walk very well.

Ben’s voice came from behind me. “This is your last lesson, Beth. So you don’t ever forget.”

They dragged me to the rail. They tied my hands to a pipe over my head, the rail catching me at the waist.

That was the worst time ever. He whipped me loud. He whipped me inside out. By the time he was done, Ben had whipped me deaf.

After that whipping, they cut me down and left me lying like a puddle on the floor. I didn’t make a sound. I didn’t move. I didn’t wait anymore.

They came to get me later on, having to carry me up the stairs. My eyes were so crusted over that Kat had to work at cleaning them for hours, making over me, saying, revery and revery. Bright lights and shapes scared me for near a year afterward.

But Kat and the boys were so sweet, so good to me.

I had graduated. I was seasoned. I was a child born from a sharp and sorry womb.

“Oh my God.”

My eyes go half-open. I lift my head a bit and smell rather than see that my cheek is smack in the middle of a pile of vomit. My left nostril is half buried in it and burns like hell from sucking it in.

A guy bends down. His face looms before my eyes.

“She’s still alive.” He steps over me. I can see out into the corridor. Two maids, one an elderly black woman with horn-rimmed glasses and a watery eye, and the other fresh from south of the border, stare at me.

I hear the phone pick up. He dials. Waits.

“Yes. I need an ambulance.”

I try to push up, but can’t, so I roll over and say, “No.”

He ignores me and keeps talking.

“No,” I say again and pull myself onto my feet, using a chair for support. I stagger and fall toward him, slapping my hand down on the phone, disconnecting the call. Then I slump against the guy, wiping puke down his sleeve.

“Fuck,” he says, and steps back, staring at me like I’m a piece of shit.

“You’ve got a half hour to get out of here,” he says. “Or I’m calling the cops.”

He stalks away and slams the door behind him. The two nice ladies disappear from view.

I fall onto the bed and use the sheet to clean off my face and blow my nose. I can’t believe how bad I feel.

Crawling to the bathroom, I stumble into the tub, turn on the shower, and lie back, letting it drench both myself and my clothes. After I worm out of the shower, I brace against the sink to look in the mirror.

If Dave and Betty could only see me now. How gratified they’d feel. I wonder how long it took them to get free. I wonder how Dave’s face is doing. I bet it looks better than mine.

I trudge back to the other room and find some dry clothes, thinking I should hit a Laundromat soon.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? If you’re alive, you have to deal with all the niggly things. The keeping things clean, when all they want to do is get dirty. And the having to keep your guns handy.

That’s a trick.

Somebody pounds on my door.

“Okay,” I yell. I dress and stuff everything else into the duffel bag. Hoisting it onto my shoulder, I almost collapse. Then I drag the gym bag with its stolen merchandise along the floor, opening the door. The lovely man who’s been so helpful is standing with his arms crossed and a nasty look on his face.

Cramming everything and myself into the car, I weave out of the parking lot, cross the street to his competitor, and take a room there. Then I stumble to a nearby service station. I buy a gallon of Gatorade.