Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (36 page)

Despite the feeling that my eyes felt pasted into their sockets with glue, I managed to open them. But it wasn’t easy.

The Saturday morning sun blazed through the window on Rivington Street. I peered down at the blur of my watch. It came into focus and told me that it was twenty minutes to ten. I had slept less than six hours. I think the heat of the day had awakened me.

All that sex stuff hadn’t happened. I had dreamed it.

In the bathroom I brushed my teeth. The kid who stared back at me from the mirror was as white as a dead person. His eyes were pink, rimmed with red circles. There was crusted semen all over his legs and groin.

In the shower I scrubbed fiercely. I was trying to scrub everything out of existence: the stuff on my legs, and the past. When I came back to the bedroom I slipped quickly into my Jockeys, then sat on the edge of the bed.

“Amy, wake up.”

Nothing.

“Amy… Amy.”

She groaned a little.

“Please, Amy. I have to talk to you.”

“Lemme sleep,” she muttered.

“My parents will be here in half an hour.”

I shook her shoulder.

With a snarl, she grabbed my hand. She wrenched it off her. “Get away from me, you bastard.”

It didn’t even sound like she was talking to me. I guessed that she was really angry at what I’d done.

“Amy, I have to talk to you before they get here.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Please, Amy.”

“Are you crazy?” she mumbled.

“Amy.”

“Wake me ten minutes before they get here. Then we’ll talk.”

“Now, Amy.”

I shook her again; I gripped bone under white skin. She kept pushing me away, she flung a fist to try to hit me, but she missed. She growled, she snapped, she cursed. She called me names that I don’t want to remember. It didn’t matter. I kept at her like a rabid dog.

“My head hurts. Billy, for fuck’s sake, leave me be
.
“

“Amy, you’ve got to help me.”

Suddenly she jumped up, so swiftly that her body was a narrow flash of light. “What
is
it? What’s
wrong
with you? Now you did it, now you woke me.” She bolted for the bathroom. “Now my bladder’s gonna bust if I don’t…”

The bathroom door slammed on the rest of it.

When she came out she hadn’t brushed her hair and it looked like a Raggedy Ann doll left in the gutter. She had wrapped a towel around her body — it went almost twice around her chest.

“All right, Billy, what is it?”

I had figured it out. I knew who she was angry at. I understood what had happened. Why she didn’t want to be touched. Why she had slapped me when I first tried to help her onto the bus. Why she’d said what she’d said in the Rockies’ locker room at Shea. I think I even knew why Ginette had locked her up and stabbed her when she came out.

“Carter did it to you,” I said.

She strode on thin legs to the table by the side of the bed, found her packet of
bidis
, fished one out, struck a match with a shaking hand, and lit up. She sucked the smoke deep into her lungs.

“Come on,” she said, “didn’t you always know?”

I’d always thought it was something she feared he would do — that’s what I thought she was telling me when I stood in the snow at the top of Aspen Highlands. That’s why I flew home in such a hurry. I didn’t know that Carter, that piece of soggy shit, had already done it.

Or maybe it had happened after the phone call. Maybe I’d been too slow to help her.

“When, Amy?”

She raised her chin up, looking strong and resolute. “Why’s it matter?” she asked, while the smoke trickled out of her nostrils.

“When did he do it to you?”

“Jesus, don’t you get it?”

“No.”

“All the time.”

The room darkened. I thought I would vomit.

She told me everything in a voice that was cool and not the least bit shrill. She told me more than I wanted to know. It had started when she was eight. Maybe nine.

I didn’t think I heard her right.
Eight or nine?

Yeah, she said. Touching her. Getting her to touch him. Help me, honey. Get the old snake hard. Get him off. Kiss him — there. He kissed her too, down below. It felt good, she said. He was kind to her, he gave her a lot of presents. And then, when she was ten, right after her tenth birthday, he penetrated her. A present for you, sweetheart.

And always, after that: Sweet baby, this is a special occasion. This is something I want you to do for me. Show me that you really love me the way I love you. Make me happy tonight. Don’t be mean. You’re so pretty.

It’s not fair to me that you’re so pretty.

He’d drummed it into her that there was nothing wrong with it. He was her father, she was his daughter, there couldn’t be anything wrong between a father and daughter who loved each other. But she had to keep quiet about it because other people were stupid and they wouldn’t understand.

He cried and said that he couldn’t help himself. It was her fault, all her fault, because she was so cute and sexy.

Ginette was usually passed out at the hour when Carter left the RV and went up to the living room where Amy slept on the pullout sofa, but there were times when she woke up and found him missing from the bed in the RV. So she had figured it out. She tried to accuse him but Carter knocked out one of her teeth with his fist. Ginette was always black and blue. She believed that if she went to the police they’d throw Carter in prison and she wouldn’t be able to survive on her own with three kids to feed.

“He wanted me to go with him and his amigos on the boat that weekend, fishing. I knew what he had in mind. He was always telling me what good guys his friends were and that I should be nice to them. I got the feeling he had a plan for that weekend. He said, ‘This is going to be a special trip.’ I want you to be real nice to Woody.’ Ginette picked up on that.”

“I don’t let you take her,” Ginette said. “You going to kill this kid, you sonofabitch.”

And to make sure it didn’t happen — at least, not on that weekend — she waited until Carter had gone to the toilet after his pancakes and fried eggs. She herded Amy into the closet, and she hid the key in the bread bin. Carter came out. Where is she? Where’s the goddam kid?

He punched Ginette in the stomach. Go ahead, beat me up, Ginette yelled, when she had her breath back, I don’t care. Carter threatened to break down the closet door. Ginette snatched up a kitchen knife.

“I put this in your black heart. You kick the door down, got to turn your back. I wait!” She waved the knife.

The amigos waiting for him at the dock in Montauk, and when he couldn’t get Ginette to give up the key and when he wrenched at the door handle to the closet and finally realized it wouldn’t open, he slammed out the door. I couldn’t truly put myself into Ginette’s mind, but I tried. She hated Carter for doing it to Amy, but maybe, also, she hated Amy even more for letting Carter do it.

Two days later, when she came out of her stupor and dug the key out from under the loaf of wheat bread and let Amy out of the closet, she yelled: “You slut… you
freak!
“

And she took a swipe at her with the knife.

Smoking her
bidis
, sitting on the edge of the bed, white back three-quarters turned to me, so that I could see the veins in her neck like bluish bruises under her skin, Amy told me those nauseating things.

The doorbell rang. That hard buzz cut through the terrifying silence.

My own parents had arrived at Rivington Street. There was nothing I could do about that. I had to leave Amy and ring the buzzer so that they could come up in the creaking elevator while I tried to stop shaking.

They had parked in the big lot at Houston and Essex. Simon would have come, too, my mom said, except that he was at music camp in Maine, banging on his drums and learning to play guitar.

“He sends you his love, Billy.”

They felt they had to say things like that. I knew Simon hadn’t said a word. Maybe: “Say hello to Billy.”

My dad looked tanned and fit except that under his eyes he had little gray swells that I’d never seen before. My mom, wearing white, looked smart, but under her makeup her color wasn’t good. She had brought bags full of food: tropical fruits, a Sara Lee pound cake, tins of anchovies, assorted French cheeses and crackers, and fresh-squeezed tangerine juice from Dean & Deluca on Newtown Lane. She probably thought we were starving on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they didn’t sell food. From some tissue paper she unwrapped a pale-violet-colored Balinese silk scarf.

“This is a gift for Amy. Are you sure she won’t join us, Billy?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe. I’ll ask her again in a little while. She’s really knocked out from not sleeping.” I was cutting up a papaya for Iphigenia, who was scampering around the room. “It was pretty hot last night.”

“There’s no air conditioning in your apartment?”

“No, Mom.”

“Manhattan is the capital of hot,” my dad said. “July and August are killers. I doubt that you’ll be here then, but if you were, you… ah… you’d find out.”

He tapped his fingers all the time on the arm of his easy chair, but that was something he always did.

“Where’s your uncle?” my mom asked me.

I knew that one of the reasons Uncle Bernie had gone to Connecticut was that he didn’t want to face his sister, who would pull him to one side and tell him he was a disloyal brother and a corrupting uncle, and then my dad would probably tell him that he was a co-conspirator in a status offense. Maybe if an adult did that he was guilty of something even worse. I think Ginger may have had that on her mind.

“Away for the weekend,” I said.

Iphigenia landed from nowhere onto my mom’s shoulder, then bounded off again the length of the bamboo sofa.

“Billy, could you please put that monkey in her cage before she tears my dress or makes me crazy?”

“Yes, Mom.” I put the plate of fruit in the cage and Iphigenia ran right in so that I could swing the grill shut and lock it. It wasn’t enough to slide the little bolt. I had to hang a rock from it. Otherwise Iphigenia could pick her way out.

“Who cut your hair, Billy?”

“I did.”

“I wish you’d waited until you could go to the hairdresser. You cut holes in it. Do you have a sore throat? You sound hoarse. And you look terrible. Your eyes are bright red.”

“Let him be,” my dad said.

My mom asked, “Did you read that article from the
Times
, Billy?”

“I read it, Mom.”

“What did you think?”

“Could be true. Could be partly true. It’s a theory. He didn’t offer proof.”

“But I’m sure there
is
proof.”

“It’s not in the article.”

She sighed. I was a difficult kid.

“Can we see your apartment?”

“Amy’s asleep there.”

“There’s only one bedroom?”

I nodded.

“Uncle Bernie couldn’t give you separate places?”

I knew that she wanted to know if there were twin beds. I said, “We’re comfortable.”

My mom was struggling to understand something that was difficult for her. My dad asked me what I intended to do with the rest of the summer.

“Maybe open a lemonade business on one of the beaches.”

“If it’s a city beach, you’ll need a city permit.”

“Can I get one?”

“I’d have to research the statutes. And after the summer?”

“School. Wherever we are.”

“What exactly does that mean?” my dad asked.

“Oh! That reminds me —” My mom dug into her straw handbag. I don’t think she wanted to grasp the meaning of what I’d just said. She handed me a letter. “Mrs. Ostrow says that neither of you has to take the final exam in History. She gave both of you passing grades.”

My mom had opened my mail. She thought she had the right. She and my dad were determined to treat me like a child. Probably because they hoped I would then start acting like a child. What they didn’t see was that you can’t go backwards in life. Well, you can, people do it all the time, but it’s not good for you.

“Billy, listen to me.” Suddenly, without any warning, she was fighting back tears. “You’re
twelve
.”

“That’s just a number, Mom.”

“I promised myself I wouldn’t argue with you — “

“Diana…” My dad was warning her.

“— but I can’t help it. You can’t do this. Can’t do what you’re doing. We won’t permit it.”

Her best intentions broke down and she leaked tears. Soon it was full flood. Her office staff wouldn’t have recognized her.

From where he had been sitting on the couch, my dad moved across the room to the bamboo chair where she huddled. He bent to one knee on the carpet.

“Sweetheart…”

She rested her head against his shoulder. What could I do? Huddle with them? Bawl? Part of me wanted to do that. But that was the baby in me. The other part of me told me to be strong. Be who I was, who was I was becoming, not who they wanted me to be.

My mom excused herself to go to the bathroom, and the moment she was gone from the room, my dad leaned forward on the couch. “Billy, you see her pain. You don’t see mine, but it’s there.”

“Dad, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry’s not enough.”

My throat got all choked. “It’s all I’ve got.”

“We could make you come back. We have that power.”

“Make me come back by force.”

“Force would be legal. And morally appropriate.”

“I know you would do that, Dad, because you thought it was the right thing to do, not because you were mean or anything. But how would you actually do it? Would you chain me up?”

His intelligent, blue, alert eyes looked me over. He was trying to decide if I was being wiseass or serious. He really didn’t know.

“You’d have to put me away in one of those facilities,” I said.

“If I thought it would save your life, Billy, I would do just that.”

“You think I’m — what do they call it? — incorrigible?”

“Prove to me that you’re not.”

“You think my life’s in danger?”

“I don’t believe that you’re in any imminent danger of losing it. Ruining it… yes.”

I wondered if there was something I didn’t see. You can’t see everything. You’ve only got one set of eyes.