The Bleeding Season (11 page)

The year before, President Nixon had resigned, and Patty Hearst had been kidnapped.  In January, men who seemed to be on television constantly at hearings none of us paid much attention to—John N. Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman, and John D. Erlichman—were found guilty of the Watergate cover-up and sentenced to jail time ranging from thirty months to eight years.  In April, the Vietnam War finally ended as the city of Saigon surrendered and the remaining Americans were evacuated.

Between Vietnam and Watergate, times had changed—even at thirteen you could sense it—both had damaged us as people somehow, and things didn’t feel the same.  People had begun to view the world differently, with less trust and higher cynicism.  The damage was done, and good, bad or indifferent, the country would never be the same again.

But that summer there were more important things to most thirteen-year-old boys.  The Red Sox were tearing it up (and would go on to the World Series, only to lose to Cincinnati in a heartbreaking game-seven).  Bernard’s mother had taken us to the R-rated films
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, and
Dog Day Afternoon
, but when
Jaws
hit the theaters it immediately became the coolest and scariest thing any of us had ever been allowed to see.  Even in summer hotspots like Potter’s Cove and all throughout Cape Cod, people stayed out of the water in record numbers, constantly on the lookout for killer sharks, seeing fins behind every wave.

Later that year President Ford would survive two assassination attempts in less than seventeen days, then go on to lose to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.

But the summer prior, the summer of 1975, marked the first real memory I had that signaled there was something a bit different about Bernard.    

Of the group, Bernard had the youngest mother, and although all our parents knew one another, none of them socialized or could be described as friends.  She was the only one who didn’t work.  She had injured her back and received disability checks from the government, though she always looked fine to us.  She drank a lot and rarely left the house during the day, but despite her problems, she was a very attractive woman, and considered by us to be a “cool” mom.  Bernard slept at one of our houses almost every weekend, as his mother “entertained” various men she met at the local taverns she frequented and preferred to be alone with her beaus.  This was common knowledge, but something none of us ever talked about, as Bernard seemed fine with it and only became embarrassed or upset if someone outside our group made a comment.

Of course, between her looks and behavior (which included sunbathing in their backyard in a bikini during the summer months) she quickly became a focal point for much of our hormone-crazed pubescent lust, but it was always kept quiet if Bernard was around.  Still, he knew we were all drooling over his mother, but he seemed too preoccupied with every other female in town to notice.  An interest in women was still relatively new to all of us, and Rick was the only one who’d had sex, having lost his virginity just weeks after his thirteenth birthday to a fifteen-year-old high school cheerleader the rest of us could only dream about even talking to.

Tommy had a more mature attitude than the rest of us did, and tended to hold back a bit, staying on the fringe of our mania like any sound leader.  Yet we knew he easily could have found a girl to “do it” with had he wanted to.  He was so good-looking it was unfair, yet he seemed to never use it to his advantage, as if somehow he were unaware of it.  Donald was still at a point where he pretended (largely for the benefit of the rest of us) that girls were of sexual interest to him, and Bernard and I pulled up the proverbial rear, spending most waking hours thinking about girls but rarely getting anywhere near them.

The following September we’d enter high school, and within months I’d have my leather-jacket-wearing rebel routine down and my first real girlfriend.  But that summer I was still a gangly and awkward kid with a twenty-four-hour erection—
a hard-on with feet
—my older brother Kenny had labeled me.  He was five years older than I was, which had made him old enough to understand what had happened to our father, to miss him, and it devastated him.  By the time I entered high school he had already graduated and enlisted in the Navy.  He’d always seemed wholly uncomfortable in the role of big brother, much less surrogate father figure, so he kept his distance, and although it never seemed malicious or deliberate, I saw him just often enough to miss him, and frequently felt like an only child.  He left home and joined the Navy at the end of that summer of 1975 and never looked back.  From that point forward my memories of my brother consisted mostly of postcards he’d send from points all over the globe, and the one or two times a year I’d actually see him, when he’d blow into town for a day or two then head right back out on a ship to some distant locale.

A lot happened that summer—a lot changed, and memories were abundant—but on this night, sitting amidst the pale glow of security nightlights in that drab used car dealership, sipping beer and thinking back, I focused on one particular afternoon.

*   *   *

We moved through the forest purposefully, striding quickly along the path until we reached an incline and finally a large clearing more than fifty yards in.  Perhaps fifteen feet high and set on a circular cement platform stood an old stone fireplace.  In years past, when this particular stretch of state forest had been a popular camping area, the fireplace had been a necessary intrusion to the natural setting that kept fires set by the hordes of campers who descended on the area each summer safely contained.  But due to the continued growth of residential lots being sold and built upon, along with the emergence a few years prior of a more modern campground on the other side of town, this patch of woods had been all but forgotten.  Here, the forest had been thinned out considerably, and the new house lots were slowly closing in, but the appeal for us was that you could still reach this relatively private area quickly, in less than five minutes in fact, from the center of town.

Once we’d reached the fireplace I stopped, surveyed the surrounding area for witnesses then gave Bernard the go-ahead nod.

He crouched down in front of the fireplace, removed several round stones blocking the front then reached his hand inside up to the elbow.  It returned holding a magazine concealed in clear plastic.  My heart skipped a beat—it was true.  Bernard hadn’t been making it up.

“Holy shit,” I mumbled, “is that it?”

Bernard scrambled away from the fireplace and plunked down onto a bed of pine needles, eyes blinking rapidly behind thick lenses of glass.  “Check it out.”

I sat next to him.  The sides of the plastic bag were blurred from condensation and dirt.  “How long has it been in there?”

“Couple days.”  Bernard laid the bag across his lap and set to opening it as if handling fine china.  “I didn’t want to risk leaving it at home.  If my mother finds this she’ll freak out.”

Bernard had claimed he’d come into possession of a certain magazine, one that supposedly made
Playboy
 look like a comic book in comparison.  He had not mentioned this magazine to anyone but me, or so he claimed, but you could never be totally sure with Bernard.  His lies were never malicious, but they were often plentiful, and it left even close friends like me off guard at times as to when he was or wasn’t telling the absolute truth.  I’d been very leery when he’d first mentioned it that morning—a magazine so intense he couldn’t keep it at home, couldn’t tell anyone but his closest friends about because it was so bad—the whole thing reeked of a Bernard story.  But, here we were.

I looked around, abruptly aware of how quiet the forest was but for the occasional cackle of a bird or the windy echo of a car speeding past on the nearby highway.

“OK, we gotta go easy with it because it’s not in the greatest shape.”  Bernard carefully removed what appeared to be a very old magazine from the plastic sleeve.  On the cover was a black and white photograph of a blonde woman tied to a wooden chair.  She wore a bra, panties, garter belt, stockings and high heels, and some sort of leather harness similar to a horse’s bit had been attached to her mouth.  At first glance she looked like a typical model on one of the “true crime” or “detective” magazines we’d managed to get a hold of in the past, magazines featuring scantily clad women and headlines like
Knife-Wielding Sex Fiend Tortures Bubbly Blondes!
 (Or some equally lurid blurb), and yet, even initially it seemed different somehow.  The look in this woman’s eyes didn’t look posed or phony like the models I’d seen before.  She looked genuinely terrified.  My eyes shifted quickly to the words in bold red letters above her picture: BITCHES IN HEAT.  The cover was cracked in several places, faded with age and dog-eared, and I couldn’t find a price listed anywhere.  It had something of an amateur look to it, not a nice slick and glossy cover, like most magazines I’d seen in stores or on the newsstands.

“You’re not gonna fucking believe this.” Bernard laughed, sounding more guttural than gleeful.  “It’s from the ’60s, I guess, and it’s
illegal
.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Chuckie DiNunzio.”

“Figures.”

“I was gonna buy another
Penthouse
or something, but I asked if he had any other stuff, you know, better stuff where the girls were doing shit instead of just laying there.
Porno
.”

“Yeah, dip-shit, I know what it’s called.”

Bernard gave a wide grin.  “Anyway, Chuckie said he had some underground stuff that used to belong to his old man.  He said there was a big stack of them buried under a bunch of crap down in his basement, so he took me down there and let me go through them.  Man, I was freaking out, thinking Chuckie’s old man might show up, but Chuckie said the magazines had been down there so long his old man probably didn’t even remember they were there.  Anyway, I went through them real quick and picked one out.  I didn’t even know what was in it until I got a chance to sit down by myself and check it out, and then—
ohhh, baby
!”

I elbowed him lightly and laughed.  “You’re such a fucking goof, Bernard, I swear to God.”

He laughed too, but quickly grew serious.  “Hey, Chuckie says if they catch you with stuff this bad you’re screwed royal.”

I shrugged.  “Chuckie DiNunzio’s a moron.”

“It was more expensive than the other ones, too,” Bernard said as if he hadn’t heard me.  “Twenty bucks.”

“
Twenty bucks
?  Where the hell you get that much cash?”

“Lifted it out of my mother’s purse.”

“She’s gonna miss that much, you fucking idiot.”

“She already asked if I took it,” he said through a smile.  “I just said no and she believed me.”

I shook my head.  “You’re nuts, man.”

“Hey, don’t tell anybody about the magazine, OK?  Chuckie said if it got back to him that I told anybody where I got it him and DJ would kill me.”

Chuckie DiNunzio was a squat kid who wore wayfarer sunglasses and his hair slicked straight back.  From his skinny ties to his straight-legged Levi corduroys, Chuckie was a neighborhood legend that came from a family of convicts and seemed destined to follow.  A year older than we were, he’d run the neighborhood’s version of a black market for as long as we could remember.  Whatever you needed, Chuckie either had it or could get it.  If he came up empty his best friend and sidekick DJ Jablonski went to work on it.  DJ, who was borderline retarded but physically enormous and the only sixteen-year-old still in junior high school, also provided Chuckie with the muscle he needed when deals went bad or “customers” got out of line.  Chuckie dealt mostly in cigarettes,
Playboy
and
Penthouse
 magazines, beer, pocket and hunting knives—even concert tickets once we hit high school.  If you wanted it but couldn’t get it, Chuckie DiNunzio was the man to see.

This, however, seemed over the top even for Chuckie.

“I ain’t gonna say shit to anybody,” I mumbled.

Bernard carefully peeled back the cover to reveal a group of pictures segmented into various panels across the page.  All were black and white and continued in a series what had begun on the front cover.  The same woman was bound to the chair, the photographs tight shots; the background dark and without depth, as if they had been shot in front of a ceiling-to-floor black sheet.  My eyes moved slowly, taking in one picture after another, each worse than the one before it.  A fat shirtless man in a leather mask had joined the woman, and stood next to a table on which several odd devices and instruments of torture had been scattered.  The first series of pictures consisted of the man hovering over the woman threateningly then progressed to a row where he was holding her chin up and slapping her repeatedly across the face.

“That’s fucked up,” I said.  This magazine was already having the opposite effect on me that others had.  A naked woman was one thing, but this was dark and grotesque and not even remotely sexy.

“Oh,” Bernard said breathlessly, “wait.”

He turned the page and although something told me not to, I looked anyway.

The man had cut the woman’s bra off and let it fall to the floor.  In the remaining series he was touching her while she screamed and attempted to squirm away.  The last photograph on the page showed the man standing next to the table, an odd metallic device with a long and thin rubber hose dangling from it in one hand, his other pointing a reprimanding finger at the still bound and terrified woman.

“What the hell is that?” I gulped so hard it hurt.

Bernard looked at me and smiled; his small chest rising and falling faster than before; a band of bright sunshine reflecting off his eyeglasses.  “You know what an enema is?”

I did, but it took me a few seconds to remember the exact mechanics of it.  “Jesus,” I finally said, “he’s not gonna do that, is he?”

Bernard nodded rapidly, his face flushed, but not from the sun.  He turned the page.

“She looks all scared at first,” he said, slowly returning his gaze to the magazine, “but then once it starts she likes it, see?”