Stolen Life (22 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
“When I came into the basement I would look at the woodstove, to see if it was stoked for evening. If it was, I’d sleep stretched out on my pile of rags; if not, I’d hide in a hole like a small tunnel. When Dad wasn’t home I’d dig the hole bigger at least to curl up in, and over time maybe stretch out. If I was willing to sleep balled up, it was in this hole tunnel. All the time he thought I was running the streets, I was mostly there.
“Just stay alive, hang on. Dad never knew where I was. Nor, it seemed sometimes, cared: he was too busy drinking, trying not to remember much, looking for some kind of happiness, you know, just getting past one day into another.
“But he was always a laugher too, always. Every one of us kids learned that from him. In the next minute telling a crazy story and all of us laughing so loud our ears hammered. And ‘stop feeling sorry for yourself’: he and Mom agreed on that, absolutely. But he never paid her even the one dollar a year he promised her for child support.”
How could this happen?
A cop car brakes beside me and I run—they killed my brother, they can kill me—run to a house, banging on the door, and I scramble in as it opens. I try to hide under the dining-room table, its lovely lace cloth hangs down to the ground, but cops are at the door. They come in and drag me out, clamping their big hands over my screams. I’m in a padded cell in the uptown police station by the courthouse. Take off your clothes, they order; there are perhaps six or seven uniforms around me in a semicircle. I hunch together, crying. One uniform says, I don’t want no part of this, and two of them leave. I’m curled naked in the corner of the padded cell, and they give me coffee. When I wake up groggy, I’m all wet, as if I’ve been hosed down to clean me; my hair seems glued to the floor. The matron covers me
with an itchy blanket and she leads me out of the padded cell upstairs to another cell. It has beds, and a cop looks at me through the trap-flap in the steel door and I scream out the second-floor window at people on the street, Get my dad, Clarence Johnson, 410 South Jackson! A man is listening to me, but a needle is poked into my arm and, when I come to again, I wrap myself in the blanket and the cell door is unlocked and I run. Somebody yells, Hey, she’s loose! but I’m outside, running down the street till the dope kicks in again; I’m falling on the sidewalk, people try to grab me; I’m running through a barrier into the bus depot; I curl together on the moving baggage belt so I’ll disappear into the black hole with it. Then my father is there, picking me up; he carries me wrapped in the blanket into our house.
I am lying on the couch, and Dad is giving me shit for whoring around and who knows what else. So I show him what they did. His thick lips mumble curses steadily as he touches the belt marks whipped across my chest, around each thigh. I cry, cry; he rubs my head and his own head in rage and frustration as he checks me all over so gently and begins to cry with me. Then he shoves me back onto the couch, opens his pants, pushes himself down on me.
I can’t breathe. My mouth is stretched open, my head twisted, my nose bent against the back of the couch so I don’t have to see, though I have to hear him on top of me. The little cowboys woven into the couch covering are against my eyes, so close they’re just blotches.
Dad is crying, sobbing out loud and begging forgiveness, he’s sorry, so sorry, he got carried away, but I can get up and I run. Our neighbour finds me curled under his big tree. He takes me into his house, but when he says Police I slip away and back into our basement. I sleep and sleep. When I wake up I wait for Dad to leave, and then I climb up into the bathroom and lock the door. I’m covered by gentle water, as hot as I can stand, then Dad comes back before I’m out and I find him sitting with his
gun. I think he’s going to shoot himself. We struggle. The gun goes off and blasts a hole in the wall behind him.
When I call Clarence and, in the course of our conversation, ask him whether he ever fought physically with Yvonne, he admits he did. Once, when he found her with a “boy in the back room, I went in there and threw him out.” But he denies, categorically, any sexual assault on her. “I spanked the kids some, sure, and I fought with Earl the one time, but there was no sexual assault. No way, nothing like that. I kissed them goodnight, I never penetrated any of them.”
Yvonne:
The police say when a girl turns sixteen Montana law requires that all her juvenile court and police records—sixteen and under?—be sealed for ever. But you can’t seal memories for ever. To me they sometimes seem more like nightmares, but it is broad daylight. I am not asleep.
I know I tried to kill myself once with the gas stove and Dad found me after I was unconscious, but not far enough to force him to take me to the hospital. Twice he finds me passed out on his bed, holding his gun—I don’t know how I got there. Leon is out of jail and back in Butte and shacked up with Liz Green, who’s got one child so she can get welfare easily and live on her own. Finally I move in with Ellie Waite’s family, but her mom kicks me out when Ellie and I go joy-riding in her car, and then one evening I meet her cousin Ed, who’s just passing through. He’s from California with some hillbillies in a blue car, and a biker and his wife travel with him. They’re really decent, and one of them, Denny, says to me, You’re a good kid, Indian. Where you’re not welcome, I’m not welcome either. You want to light out west, California?
So we all pile into the blue car and go.
Denny and his wife drive, and another guy, Sammy, is such a fabulous talker he cons a man we meet in a parking lot out of
his shorts, and then his false teeth too! They laugh like crazy on the road, but I’m quiet. The car leans into winding curves along valleys and between mountains. Ed won’t take me over any state border, he tells me. “If you want to go, walk across by yourself.”
So I walk across. I’m fifteen, I can take care of myself, and they wait in the car for me on the other side. The trailer in La Puente, California, where I’m left, is infested with cockroaches and for a while I babysit for a woman who’s shacking up with her own brother and she gives me something to eat sometimes, but then the brother tries a heavy run on me and I move under the trailer for a while. Nobody knows I’m there.
One day Sammy and Ed find me under there and they say this is no good, they should never have brought me. They decide they’ll take me back home to Butte after we go to Indianapolis, Indiana. I have no idea how far that is, but Ed and I have a bet going: he sings a line from a song and I sing the next, and I always win, until one day he sings an Elvis song I’ve never heard and he finally wins his bet. Denny and his wife are gone; there are three other people travelling with us and we live by Sammy’s “artistry” as he calls it—hotels, fast-food places. We never steal or rip anyone off; sometimes Elaine, a girl travelling with us, turns a trick, but I don’t, nor am I asked to. I see Death Valley, the Houston Astrodome, Knotts Berry Farm with the biggest roller-coaster in the world; we travel old Number 66 till it connects to the new Interstate outside St. Louis. I see the San Francisco bridge from a distance, the island of Alcatraz, and the Grand Canyon. I walk on the beach where they shot
Jaws
, though I don’t touch the water; and we cross the wide Missouri, coming all the way from Montana, at St. Louis.
Ed’s family lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, all hillbillies now in the big city. We’re on our way back to Butte, the long way round, but we’ll get there, and we’re having a farewell party in a park and I’ve never drunk much, though all of them are winos, but now I drink and start to feel good. Elaine goes off with someone into the car, and a guy, Red, is talking to me. I want to have a boyfriend, I’ve never had one, and I like him. I try to talk to
him, all giggly with wine, and Red pours wine down my legs. I’m wearing shorts and I go quiet, I let it happen.
Red and I are in the car when the guy who took Elaine there tries to get in too and I jump out the other side. It’s Red’s friend, but Red promises me the moon and the stars and I decide to stay with him, so Sammy and Ed leave without me, heading west I think. We never meet again. I live in one house, then another, and Red’s friend tries to force himself on me again and Red says, okay, that’s it, I’ll get rid of him and when I do, I’ll come back for you. He drops me off outside a bar and I never see him again either.
I hang around a few days, shoplift a few cans of ravioli and spaghetti and eat them cold. I sleep huddled in parked cars when I can find a door open, but finally I beg a dime outside a bar and call the cops on myself. In the big Missing Persons Bureau the walls are literally papered over with missing people; the summer of ’77, it looks like a thousand pictures of bodies of all races and ages and sex reported missing or Jane and John Does they’ve found dead. Who am I? I give them my name, and Dad’s, and our address in Butte, but they say they have no interstate police reports of me missing. They place me in a building with steel mesh for windows and three chains locked across the mesh on the steel door. I’m there seven days with over three hundred girls. I’ve never been near Black girls before—there was only one Black family in Butte—and one of the hundreds in here whose pale grey skin is scarred into ridges because her mother tried to disappear her by burning threatens to kill me. But then Dad sends money and they put me on a bus for Montana. It took so long because no authority could verify I was missing.
Dad says he always knew I was alive—I don’t know how and he never explains—and here I was back in the tilted house on Jackson Street. I tell him I’ll pay back the bus fare as soon as I have it and he just says, fine, fine. I move into the far side of the house, barricade the door to the one room I need, and go in and out through the back door on my side of the house; his side has the only bathroom, but I won’t use it unless he’s out. It’s only
fall; at night I can easily do whatever I need to outside in the dirt yard with its lilac bushes.