We All Fall Down (2 page)

“Do you have any enemies, Mr. Jerome?”

Yipes, her father, enemies. The thought was ludicrous. He was Mister Good Guy. Business manager of the telephone company in Wickburg. Wore white shirts, striped ties, smiled a lot, played golf on Saturday afternoons, went to church with his family on Sundays, served on the United Way committee every year. Who could possibly be his enemy? Although she would never admit it aloud to anyone, her father was a sweetheart. He never gave her a hard time or any grief at all. Never grounded her, never ran out of patience with her or Karen or their younger brother, Artie, who was at the peak of brathood. As a result, Jane tried to do things to please her father, to merit not being grounded.

“Do I have any enemies?” Her father’s voice was suddenly like a little kid’s voice, uncertain, puzzled.

She had to get out of there, didn’t want to listen anymore, hated hearing her father being questioned, hated the way he sounded vulnerable, a little scared. It made her feel vulnerable and scared too.

Out on the back porch, in the freshness of the April morning, she flung herself into the old wicker rocking chair. Ordinarily, she would have fled to her room, where she could always find comfort and consolation. But her room, too, had been ruined. She had loved that room, the predominance of blue, her favorite color. And all her favorite things. Her special glass menagerie of frogs and puppies and kittens. The posters on the wall—New Kids and Bruce and messages like AFTER
THE
RAIN
,
THE
RAINBOW, so many posters that her father said he could have saved the price of wallpaper if he’d known about her poster madness. The room was her turf, her refuge, her hiding place. Where she could close the door and shut out the world, the C-minus in math—the worst mark of her life—the zits popping out all over her face, the agony of Timmy Kearns
ignoring her completely after that first date. Her place of retreat to which she admitted only Patti and Leslie, with standing orders for everyone else to stay out.

Standing at the door in the first moment of discovery, seeing the torn mattress, her precious animals spilled on the floor, the posters hanging in shreds, yellow veins on the wall which she did not immediately recognize as pee, the puddle of vomit on the floor, she had grown weak, watery, felt as if she herself had been assaulted. She wanted to flee Burnside, get out of there, back to safe and sane Monument, deadly dull but peaceful, where her father played golf with the chief of police and everybody knew everybody else, even the names of the dogs and cats. A few minutes later, Karen had been discovered in the cellar, and the anger she had felt in her room paled beside the horror of what had happened to Karen.

“Damn it, damn it,” she muttered now, rocking furiously in the chair, filled with anger and guilt and—what? She stopped rocking suddenly, sat still in the chair as she caught a movement down near the hedges, past the cherry tree. Somebody or something moving furtively, a blurred image, not quite seen, and then gone. She shivered, drew her arms around herself, wondering if the trashers might be lurking in the vicinity, had returned to the scene of the crime like they said criminals did.

When Buddy Walker broke the mirror in the girl’s bedroom, using the Statue of Liberty, a splinter of glass struck him in the cheek and he saw blood oozing on his face in the mirror’s jagged reflection. He stared at it drunkenly, dropping the statue to the floor.

Actually, he did not know whether he was drunk or not. He was dizzy, yes, and giddy, and felt like he was floating, his feet barely touching the floor. The lights hurt
his eyes, but otherwise he felt pleasantly willy-nilly, letting himself go, carried along by this terrific feeling of drift, thinking: the hell with everything and everybody. Especially home.

The cut was minor, despite the blood. In the middle of all the carnage, the screaming and the shrieks of laughter and the sounds of destruction from the floor below, he made his way carefully to the bathroom and found a box of Band-Aids in the cabinet above the sink. He removed two of them, slipped one into his shirt pocket for later use and, after wiping away the smear of blood with a towel, calmly applied the other Band-Aid to his cheek. His hand was steady despite a sudden swirl of dizziness. The dizziness was pleasant, in fact, as he maneuvered himself back to the bedroom where he leaned against the doorjamb, scrutinizing the damage: the posters hanging in tatters, the collection of small animals scattered on the rug, the torn blankets and sheets, the yellow stains of piss on the wall.

Suddenly, his earlier exhilaration vanished, replaced by a sense of despair, emptiness. He felt isolated from the others, separate from the howls of jubilation and the sounds of crashing and bashing below.
I’m going to be sick.
He dropped to his knees, almost in slow motion, as vomit rushed up his throat and streamed out of his mouth onto the soft blue carpet. The smell, acid and foul, invaded his nostrils. He retched, once, twice, kneeling in the doorway, retched again and again, until nothing came up. His stomach hurt, his chest hurt, his throat hurt.

He became aware of a sudden silence from downstairs, as if Harry and his stooges were listening to him being sick. Rising to one knee, he began to gather his strength, his arms and legs trembling. He averted his eyes from the puddle of vomit on the floor.

Why so quiet down below?

Pressing his hands against his stomach, he lurched toward the stairs, steadying himself against the wall. He wanted a drink. Was desperate for one, although he did not know how he would manage to swallow the booze with the taste of vomit still like acid in his mouth and throat.

On the landing halfway down the stairs, he spotted a half-full bottle of vodka and giggled. He never giggled when he was sober, so he must be drunk. He placed his hand over his mouth to stifle further giggles and picked up the bottle. Still quiet downstairs. The lights out, too. He took a big swig from the bottle, grimacing as the vodka bombed down his throat, bracing himself for the lurch of sickness in his stomach. Instead, warmth spread throughout his body as if he were bathing in the glow of something beautifully soft and fuzzy.

He heard a sound, a moan. Or a gasp. Not sure which. Cradling the bottle in his hand, he went down the remaining stairs, hesitating in the foyer, squinting, and saw, finally, what was going on in the front hallway.

Harry Flowers had a girl against the wall. She was pinned there by Marty Sanders and Randy Pierce. They were holding her arms to the wall while Harry screwed her. Or was he screwing her? Buddy didn’t know if you could screw somebody standing up like that. But he was doing something. His pants and striped shorts were halfway down his legs, his ass gleaming in the light spilling in from the front porch. The girl’s face was partly hidden in shadows but he saw her frantic eyes, wide with horror. Randy’s right hand was like a suction cup on her breast.

“Jesus,” Buddy said, the word exploding from his mouth like the vomit a few minutes ago upstairs.

“Me next,” Marty said, grinning at Buddy. He was small and wiry and did not weigh much over one hundred
pounds but had this big foghorn voice. “Wait your turn, Buddy.”

The girl looked directly at him now, her eyes agonized, pleading, and Buddy drew back into the shadows. He wasn’t sick anymore. Wasn’t anything. As if he had stumbled out of his own life into another, a new existence altogether. He blinked, hugging the bottle as he would a newborn baby.

“Jesus,” he said again, his voice a whisper.

Suddenly, Randy howled with pain, and the girl was loose. One moment pinned to the wall, the next moment, free. Not really free but pulling away from her captors while Randy danced around, holding his hand to his mouth, sucking at it. “She bit me,” he cried in disbelief.

“You bitch,” Harry yelled as he fell backward, tripping over his pants and shorts, which were now down around his ankles. “Get her,” he ordered in a tight, deadly voice.

Nobody moved, not even the girl, as if they were caught in the flash of a camera’s naked bulb like a picture on the front page of a newspaper. Then: movement, swift, like fast-forward on a VCR, Randy sucking at his hand, Harry now doing his own dance as he pulled up his pants, Marty grabbing at the girl. The girl tore herself away from Marty’s grasp, gathering her torn blouse around her breasts. But she had nowhere to go, really, and ran blindly into the wall while Harry, pants pulled up at last, threw himself toward her, yelling, “Bitch.”

Buddy saw that the girl had not run into a wall but against a door. She tried to open the door as Harry grappled toward her. Crazy: she was trying to escape into a closet. When she pulled the door open, he saw that it was not a closet but the doorway to the cellar. As the door swung open, Harry leaped toward her, grabbing at her body, his fingers raking her back. She swiveled to avoid his
grasp and the movement gave Harry enough time to fling himself forward. But he did not grab her. Instead, he pushed. With both hands. Pushed at her shoulders, once, twice. The girl screamed as she fell forward down the stairs.

Buddy closed his eyes against the sound of her falling. A long time ago, when he was a little kid, he had been in his father’s car when it struck an old man crossing the street. He had never forgotten that sound. Like no other sound in the world. Not like a bat hitting a ball or a hammer hitting a nail or a firecracker exploding or a door slamming. The sound had a hollowness in it and in this hollow place was the smaller sound that had haunted his dreams for weeks. That small sound was the sound of something human being struck. And that was the sound Buddy heard as the girl tumbled down the stairs, a series of terrible bouncings, while Harry managed to pull up his trousers and zipped his fly as if he had just finished peeing in the bathroom.

“Let’s go, bloods,” he said.

Harry was talking black this week.

Later, in the car, driving from Burnside to Wickburg, Marty and Randy discussed the merits of ketchup and mustard on hamburgers and hot dogs. Marty insisted that ketchup should never be used on hot dogs while Randy said that ketchup could be used on anything because it had an American taste.

“What do you mean—American taste?” Marty asked, disgusted, voice deep, like an old-time radio announcer’s.

“I mean ketchup is American. Like the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving. Can you imagine a Frenchman or Italian in Europe using ketchup?”

“How do you know? Have you ever been to Europe?”

The argument went on and on as Buddy stared out the window at nothing in particular. He found it hard to believe that Marty and Randy were engaged in a conversation about ketchup and hamburgers and hot dogs so soon after what had happened back in that house while Harry hummed softly as he drove the car, carefully, slowly. Harry always drove slowly, loved to frustrate drivers behind him, holding his speed down to ridiculous levels, until they tried to pass and then he’d speed up gradually, until the other driver realized he was being baited.

“All right, how about mustard?” Randy said. “Mustard works better on hot dogs. I hate it at McDonald’s when I find mustard in the hamburger.”

“McDonald’s doesn’t put mustard in its hamburgers,” Marty said. “They put a slice of pickle in the hamburger and ketchup but no mustard.”

“Of course they put in mustard,” Marty boomed. “Next time you’re at McDonald’s, look at the hamburger. Lift up the bun and take a look. You’ll see the hamburger and the pickle and the ketchup but look real close and you’ll see the mustard.”

Buddy touched the Band-Aid on his cheek. The cut didn’t hurt and was not bleeding anymore. He concentrated on the street, letting the stupid argument in the backseat flow around him. At least it kept him from thinking. Thinking of that house, how he had stood there, doing nothing, while Harry raped a girl. A kid, for crying out loud.

Silence came from the backseat now: argument over, the debate of mustard versus ketchup concluded.

“We relax now, bloods,” Harry said suddenly, quietly. “We out of their jurisdiction now. We safe and sound.”

Buddy pressed his lips together to keep himself from yelling: stop calling us bloods, for crissakes. Harry’s black
talk was ridiculous because it was not black at all but Harry’s version of black. He liked to pretend he was a street kid, from some mythical inner city instead of the son of a prominent architect. Harry was probably the whitest kid Buddy knew. Blond, wore white painter’s pants, white socks, white Nikes.

“You did good, real fine, bloods,” Harry said. “Followed orders nice.” The only order Harry had given: Don’t break any windows. “Nice, nice.” Still talking his version of black. Last week, he had affected a British accent after seeing an old movie on cable about British soldiers in India. He had pronounced it “Injia.”

No one had mentioned the house and the rape since they fled the place. When they stopped at Jedson Park where they cleaned up at the fountain, Buddy had studied the faces of the others, glancing at them cautiously. Their actions were calm and deliberate as they splashed their faces with water. Marty brushed an invisible spot of dirt from his suede flight jacket. The jacket looked old but was new, three hundred dollars’ worth of new. Buddy knew how much the jacket cost because Marty put price tags on everything. Randy’s jeans also looked old but were new. We pay a lot of money to make things look old, Buddy thought. Harry Flowers was meticulous as usual. Spotlessly clean. Blond hair so neat that it seemed like a wig. Handsome face unblemished, serene as he washed his hands.

Back in the car, Marty and Randy had begun their ridiculous conversation about hamburgers and hot dogs and then fallen into silence. Nobody in the car seemed to mind the silence except Buddy.

Finally he asked: “Why’d you pick that particular house, Harry?” He had other, more important questions to ask but had to begin somewhere.

“Dumb luck, blood.”

Blood
again.

“Not dumb, smart,” Randy called from the backseat.

Randy Pierce followed Harry around school like a big overgrown pet, an invisible tail wagging every time Harry paid him the least attention. Marty Sanders was a smaller version of Harry Flowers, thin and wiry, trying always to be cool but betrayed by a sharp tongue, the tendency to come up with a wisecrack to fit any situation. The first time he saw Randy and Marty together, Buddy flashed back to an old movie on television:
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Marty was clearly Abbott, the sharp guy, the agitator, while Randy was Costello, the buffoon, overweight, often looking bewildered. Glancing at Harry now as he turned onto North Boulevard, he decided that Harry was Frankenstein, the doctor who created the monster.