The Bleeding Season (22 page)

The apartment was filled with religious trinkets and small statues, but I couldn’t be certain if I’d entered a temple or a bunker.  I’d not seen a single photograph of her family, or anything that linked her to anyone for that matter, only an impersonal and joyless space that seemed a shrine to isolation.

Julie motioned to the table so I slid into one of the chairs while she put a kettle of water on to boil and excused herself; vanishing down a hallway off of the kitchen.  Though I hadn’t seen him since entering the apartment, I caught a whiff of the pungent odor of cooked heroin, and assumed the man was down that hallway somewhere too, filling what was left of his veins.  I was still stunned that Julie had let me in at all, and I couldn’t lose the disconcerting feeling that she’d somehow been expecting me.  That was wildly improbable, of course, but it seemed the only reasonable explanation for her saying,
I knew it
, when I’d first mentioned Bernard, and for allowing a stranger into her home with virtually no questions asked.  Coupled with the general feeling of unease the apartment emitted, my nerves were on edge and the back of my neck had begun to tingle.  But there was certainly no chill in the stagnant air.  In fact, it was then that I noticed all the windows were shut, and I found myself wondering why they would be on such a pleasant spring day.

I could feel the man’s eyes on me before he emerged from the hallway and glided over to the table.  Much calmer and under control now, but to the point of being just barely conscious, he sat down in slow motion and leaned heavily against the rickety table, a ludicrous drug-induced grin on his face.  He seemed incapable of small talk so I looked at the Bible without trying to be too obvious.  Like the other books on the table, it was tattered and dog-eared, and an inordinate number of pages had been book-marked with small sticky notes.

But for the man’s slow steady breathing, the apartment seemed impossibly quiet.

“You ever ask yourself,” he said, slurring the words, “how you got to be here—you know, like—like in
this
place at
this
 time?”

I looked into his filmy eyes.  “Been asking myself that a lot lately.”

“You look…tense.”

“It’s a tense time for me.”

“Well,” he said, his eyes closing, rolling slowly back into his head, “I figure worry is like this essentially useless, like,
thing
, you know?  Because—dig it—because it like, it like makes us feel safe because it gives us this illusion, this lying-ass
illusion
 that we have power.  More power than we really have, you see what I mean?  But in the end, man, in the end, all that leads to is fear, right?  And fear leads to confusion.”  He opened his eyes, smiled at me.  “So the way I see it is, we all got to, like, to do whatever we can to clear our heads.  You see what I’m saying, man?”

I wanted to get away from him, but continued to hold his gaze.  “Yes.”

“Questioning where some burned out spike addict gets off tossing around advice, right?”  He laughed dreamily.

The creaking floor distracted me, and I turned to see Julie crossing the kitchen to a row of cupboards above the only counter space in the room.  “Hush up now, Adrian,” she said coolly.  She had changed into a pair of old jeans and a lightweight sweater, and had let her hair down, which now hung to just above her shoulders.  Tied back, as it had been when I’d first seen her, the gray at the roots was far more evident.  “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

“No.  Thank you, though.”

She took two cups and saucers from the cupboard and placed them on the table along with a bowl of sugar, then went to the refrigerator and returned with a small pitcher of milk.  She considered me a moment, as if she planned to speak, but instead moved back to the counter and rummaged through her purse until she’d found a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.  She lit the cigarette with her back to us, only turning around once she’d drawn an initial drag and exhaled it with a sigh.

Julie Henderson was not aging gracefully.  She wore no makeup and had gained some weight, and that, combined with a look of exhaustion and a clearly intentional effort to mask her natural beauty and appear average—if not outright unattractive—gave her a slovenly look.  She took another heavy drag from the cigarette, and I noticed nicotine-stained fingers with nails gnawed down to nearly nothing.  She was six years older than I, which still only made her forty-four, but in her current state she looked closer to sixty.  An unhealthy, emotionally ravaged and physically debilitated sixty.  Somewhere nearby, her magnificence remained, buried beneath lines and crevices and dark rings, as if every instance of pain and fear and sadness and loathing had left a physical mark, a reminding scar.  The nineteen-year-old bombshell was long dead, and despite her obvious difficulties, living in her place was an adult, a woman, someone of substance, and someone for whom Madison Avenue-defined beauty was clearly no longer relevant or even of interest.

Julie swept her hair back away from her face.  “How did you find me?”

“Your address is in the book, but I didn’t know you were in Cambridge until Brian told me.  I bumped into him in town.”

“Brian.” She spoke his name as if it left a foul taste in her mouth.  “Does he know you’re here?”

“No.”

She quietly smoked her cigarette for a moment.  “Why
did
 you come here?”

It was a good question.  What had I been thinking—who the hell did I think I was?  Whether my suspicions of what had happened years before were accurate or not, what right did I have to appear from nowhere and disrupt this woman’s already difficult life?  “It might be better if we spoke privately.”

“Whatever you have to discuss with me can be said in front of Adrian, it’s all right.”  Her tone wasn’t angry but she had obviously already grown impatient.  “I trust him completely.”

I saw Adrian grin and wink from the corner of my eye.  My palms had begun to perspire so I nonchalantly wiped them on my pants and attempted a coherent sentence.  “Look, I know this is beyond odd—my showing up out of the blue like this, someone you never really knew that well and haven’t seen in years—but I didn’t know where else to turn.  It’s probably ridiculous, my being here, but I needed to talk to you, Julie.”  I folded my hands and placed them in my lap in an attempt to hold them steady.  “I asked before, but—do you remember someone from town—from Potter’s Cove—a boy named Bernard Moore?”  This time she gave no reaction, so I described him.

She drew on her cigarette, the smoke slithering about causing her to squint.  “What about him?”

“He’s dead.”

“So, what do you want from me, a sympathy card?”

“He killed himself.  Hanged himself.”

Julie crushed her cigarette in the already overflowing ashtray on the table between us and expelled a final burst of smoke from her nostrils.  “What was he to you?”

“He was my friend.”

She backed away, folded her arms over her chest and leaned back against the counter.  “Is that a fact?”

I looked to Adrian almost reflexively, but he was staring at the table as if it were the most miraculous thing he’d ever seen, so I turned back to Julie.  “But I think maybe Bernard wasn’t who I thought he was.  Some things have come to light since his death that—”

“What things?”

I stood up.  “Look, I’ve made a mistake.  I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have bothered you like this.”

“I saw the news this morning,” she announced abruptly.  “A body was found in Potter’s Cove.”

“Yes.  The body of a young woman.”

“That kind of thing happens around here quite a bit.  Bet it’s big-time news in that little shit-burgh though.”  The kettle began to whistle.  Julie strode to the stove, retrieved it and filled the two cups on the table.  It occurred to me how easily she could have scorched me by removing the top of the kettle and flinging the scalding water in my direction, and although she had given no indication of violence, there was a troubled expression on her face that concerned me.  “Sit down, Alan.  You came here for answers, didn’t you?  Why run off now that you’re so close to getting some?”

Adrian dunked his tea bag and suppressed a giggle.

I felt myself sink back into the chair, and once Julie had returned the kettle to a cool burner and rejoined us at the table, I said, “You knew Bernard then, I mean—you do remember him?”

Julie clutched her cup with both hands, brought the tea to her lips and sipped quietly. “I remember he raped me.”

At that point her answer should not have surprised me.  But it did.

“God, I…I’m sorry, I—”

“That’s what you wanted to know, wasn’t it?  That’s what you came here to ask me about.  There’s nothing else, no other reason to link him to me that you’d know about.  You already knew the answer.  You would’ve had to.”

“I suspected.  He hinted before his suicide that he’d done some things, some horrible things.”  I propped my elbows on the table and rested my face in my hands.  “God almighty, this can’t be happening.”

“I never told anyone,” she said.

They never tell
.

“I’m sorry, but I need to know what happened, Julie.  It’s important.”

“Oh, I
know
 it is.”  She took another sip of tea, her hands shaking, and before I could respond she said, “It was near the end of summer, 1975.  It happened in Potter’s Cove Woods.”

“I don’t mean to be insensitive or—”

“Just ask your questions.”

“Bernard wore those thick glasses and was physically small—a weak little runt in those days—how was he able to—”

“The element of surprise.  A knife.  And help.”

My heart was ready to explode.  “He had help?”

She nodded, reached again for her cigarettes.  “I was doing my usual run, and there was a section of woods I always cut through.”  She pushed a cigarette into her mouth with a distant gaze, like the memories were just over some horizon only she could see.  “Do you remember the stone fireplace out there, the one near the old campgrounds?”

“Yes.”

“He was sitting next to that when I first saw him,” she said, her voice sliding into monotone.  “I stopped, I—I thought he was hurt.  He was small, like you said, and he looked younger than he was, I guess.  He was just sitting there rocking back and forth and moaning and rubbing his leg.  I stopped and asked him if he was all right and he said he’d fallen and twisted his ankle.  He said if I helped him he thought he could walk, so I gave him a hand.  Why wouldn’t I have?  He looked like this defenseless and injured little kid.  Why—why wouldn’t I have helped him?  Was I supposed to just ignore him and keep running?”

“No,” I said, the word catching in my throat.  “I understand.”

“When I got him to his feet he pushed me—hard and suddenly—and I lost my balance and fell backwards and…” She drew an angry drag from her cigarette, leaving the filter crushed.  “I hit the ground hard, hit the back of my head.  I just missed that fireplace.  If I’d hit that with the back of my head I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, I can tell you that much.  I would’ve died in those woods that day.  I still…I still thought I would.  I wasn’t unconscious exactly but everything was blurry and swirling and…and the next thing I knew the kid was on top of me.  He had a knife, a switchblade he opened right near my face, and he was laughing but it wasn’t like any laughter I’d ever heard before, it—it didn’t even sound human.  He held the knife to my throat and he was talking but I don’t remember what he said, only…I only remember the sensation of being undressed, my shorts being pulled down and my legs being forced open.”

Adrian slowly rose to his feet.  “I need to go lay down for a while.”

As he hobbled off down the hallway, I saw Julie wipe a tear from the corner of her eye then take another angry stab at her cigarette.

“I’m sorry to bring all this back up, but…but can you tell me who was with—”

“I couldn’t believe what was happening,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard me.  “I couldn’t believe what this little kid, this—this
child
 was doing to me.  Even the way he’d tricked me seemed like some playground prank or something, it—it just seemed so impossible, like a dream where nothing makes sense—you know those kind?  The kind where nothing looks right or makes sense?”

I felt myself nod.

“None of it ever felt real.  He was physically so small too, like this little person crawling on top of me, it—even when he was raping me it—I couldn’t believe what was happening.”

I held closed my eyes until the visions her descriptions had created left me.

“When he’d finished—I don’t know exactly when that was because I came in and out of consciousness a couple times during it—I felt him rolling me over.  I was on my stomach and he pushed my face down and there was dirt and pine needles in my mouth.”  With the back of her hand she pawed away tears.  Tears of rage, a rage in bondage finally set free, escaping her now like a departing soul.  “I don’t…I
can’t
remember how long I was out there.  I had a concussion from hitting my head so hard, and I remember it being light, being able to see the sun through the tops of the trees, the blue sky up there looking down on us and…and then the next thing I knew it had gotten dark.  Not total darkness like late at night, the kind of darkness there is right after dusk or right before dawn, you know how I mean?”

“Julie,” I whispered, “you said Bernard had help.  I need you to tell me who was with him that day.”

She wiped away the remaining tears and seemed to regain total control of her emotions.  “You do, huh?”

“If you can tell me, yes.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“And you think you’ll understand?” she asked, her tone even more sarcastic.  “You think you’ll have the capacity to understand?  Even if I did tell you, you wouldn’t have the vaguest fucking clue as to what I’m talking about.”  She slammed her lighter against the table.  “You wanted to know if your
friend
 was guilty of raping me.  Now you know.  Go home to Potter’s Cove and get on with your insignificant little life and leave the rest of this alone.”