Authors: Ty Roth
At Kennedy, Gordon had picked up a
USA Today
and found only a paragraph under the headline “Leftist Group Claims Responsibility for Attack.” An unidentified Greek authority spoke of the probability of future unrest propagated by anarchist groups of the extreme left, but he also expressed doubt that the group, responsible for the murder of the two officers and identifying itself as the Struggle, had yet to establish a significant membership or to create the infrastructure necessary to pose a “consistent or serious threat beyond relatively minor and cowardly acts of terrorism.” Clearly, the “authority” was chumming. The article contained no mention of individual suspects in the ambush, but the investigation was ongoing.
* * *
That night, having ditched Claire, Gordon and Shelly sat, side touching side, at the end of his dock. Gordon’s feet dangled ankle-deep in the still water; Shelly, legs crossed at the ankles, swung hers a few inches above it. For a long time, they sat silently. Their internal antennae tuned to the universe, they’d lost all sense of self and of the bullshit of the world beyond the dock. Shelly broke the spell with a laugh of remembrance, and for a while they recounted the summers of their childhood, but they grew pensive when the conversation advanced to their impending senior year and the choices it would demand they make in the fashioning of some future beyond Ogontz and, most likely, each other.
Wanting to savor every delectable second of the Gordon-filled present before he’d spin out of her orbit once again, she said, “So tell me the rest of the story.”
“What story?” Gordon played coy.
“These friends you made in Athens. The girl in the black bikini and the others.”
Gordon told her everything with no sense of shame or fear of being betrayed or consideration for Shelly’s feelings for him. He began with the “chance” encounters with Zoe at the beach and at the sidewalk café and his immediate infatuation with her. With a passionate zeal, if not with total conviction,
he told her of his reading of
Che
and of his newfound “sympathy for the plight of the masses, who, worldwide, continue to be systematically victimized by the very institutions in which they place their hopes for justice and a decent standard of living.” He told her of knocking off the grocery store. He told her of the other members of the Struggle, of the stinking apartment above the fish market, of the weapons they’d collected and the bombs they intended to build and to detonate. Then, he stopped short.
Although she was conflicted by the pride she felt over the social consciousness seemingly awakened in her previously pathologically egocentric best friend, contrasted with the revulsion to the Struggle’s preference for violence, Shelly knew there was still more to tell, and she urged on his confession. “And?” she prodded.
Gordon hesitated in his response.
“And,” he began, then stopped again, then began once more. “Shelly, you can’t tell anyone. I mean it. This is some serious shit.”
(Of course, Shelly told me. But you know how that goes.
“I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone, so you can’t tell anybody else.”
Eventually, everyone and their brother tells only one other person until the entire school or town knows the secret. Luckily for Gordon, I really didn’t have anyone else to tell.)
It was the only time in her life, she said, that she saw Gordon completely vulnerable; the only time she was 100 percent sure that he was telling an absolute truth untainted by ulterior motives.
To reassure him of her complete trustworthiness and to lighten the tension of the moment, Shelly reminded him of the blood oath they’d sworn when they were kids, and she declared the covenant still binding.
“We killed two cops.” He vomited the words as if they’d
been rising repeatedly from his gorge for the past forty-eight hours, swishing around his mouth and gagging him with their acidic truth, demanding to be spit out, only to be forcefully swallowed and temporarily restored inside his poisoned bowels.
Shelly’s face washed pale; she’d just been made an accomplice. Stupidly, she responded, “Oh.”
Gordon rushed to plug the holes sprung in Shelly’s reservoir of faith in him. “I said ‘we,’ but I didn’t actually kill anybody. They did. Zoe and George, or whatever their names really are.” Even in his own ears his plea of innocence sounded inane. “I know. It was stupid.”
“Stupid? Defacing a national treasure is stupid. Being conned by firm boobs and a round ass is stupid. Robbing a store is stupid. Murder is criminal; it’s evil. What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Shell, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I do. You were thinking about getting off that black bikini.” She attempted to hide her disgust. “For such a smart guy, Gordon, sometimes you are so predictable.” For Shelly, “predictable” was about as pathetic a label as a person could have.
“You’re right. I’m not going to lie. I did want her, but I’m telling you, it was more than that.”
Shelly wanted to believe him more than you can possibly know. “Go on.”
“It happened fast. One minute I was crouched inside the van; the next I was looking at what was left of two dead cops’ heads splattered inside the truck.”
“What then?”
“I left,” Gordon said. “We were supposed to rendezvous, but I bolted. Seeing those two cops changed everything.”
“What? Guilt? Shame? Utter self-loathing?”
Gordon looked at her like she was the crazy one.
“No. I
liked
it too much. The adrenaline high was incredible. I couldn’t believe I’d been a part of something so … so … cool. That’s not the word. Radical, extreme. I don’t know, but I realized that I’ve got too much shit to do before I go and play martyr for someone else’s cause—noble or not. When I saw those cops wasted, I knew that if I rejoined the Struggle, I’d go all in. Instead, I got on the first plane I could and called you as soon as I arrived in New York.”
“They got away with it, then?”
“As far as I know.”
“You’re a fugitive, Gordon.” She couldn’t believe that she was the one giving voice to reason. “When they’re caught—and they will be, you know—one of them will identify you, if for no other reason than the attention it will draw to their cause.”
“I know. I thought about that. What am I going to do, Shell?”
“Get a lawyer. That agent lady must know someone.”
“I thought about that too. I can’t. They’ll want me to narc out my friends and to cut some kind of deal. I can’t do that. I’m not a snitch.”
“Then you better hope the black bikini and her gang don’t get caught, and don’t be surprised when your ‘friends’ contact you and blackmail you for more money. They’ve got you, Gordo. Looks like you got your wish after all. That Zoe chick fucked you big-time.”
“It’s not funny, Shelly.”
With typical Gordonian disregard for segue, he asked, “What about you? What’s with the sunny disposition? When I left, you’d gone all Sylvia Plath and shit.”
“Ha-ha,” she said, but Shelly had been waiting for this opportunity for a long time. For her own emotional well-being, she needed to share with somebody the events that had culminated in her still-to-remain-a-secret-to-Gordon abortion that I had crashed the previous December. And Gordon was the only person who might understand, and with whom she could trust her secret shame—well, most of it, anyway.
A thick cloud cover blocked the moonlight. Shelly was grateful for the tar black of the August night; it rendered them nearly invisible to one another, reducing each to a puny voice struggling to penetrate the darkness. Emboldened by the near opacity, Shelly shared a story that, had Gordon been visible, would have caused her to see the typically impervious Gordon Byron turn red with embarrassment, rage, and disgust.
“You know my father,” Shelly began rhetorically.
“Asshole,” Gordon said curtly and matter-of-factly.
“Not always,” she reacted. “He wasn’t always.”
“To me he was … is.”
It wasn’t argument that Shelly sought.
“He never liked me,” Gordon continued. “Since we were kids, he always hated me. As if everything was my fault. Like I—”
“He raped me,” Shelly blurted, stopping Gordon mid-rant.
Nature’s evening choir filled the interval of his shocked disbelief with the intermittent croaking of frogs singing bass harmony to the melodious tenor chirping of the crickets.
“He what?”
“Please, Gordon. Don’t make me say it again.”
Gordon scrambled to his feet. “He can’t get away with it.”
Rising to her knees, Shelly groped above herself in the darkness until she found a balled fist and pulled him back to the surface of the dock with both of her hands. “Sit down, Gordon. He has, and he will.” She sobbed. Tears fell in torrents. “I didn’t tell you so that you would go all knight-in-shining-armor and defend my honor or make some kind of ridiculous scene.”
“Then why did you tell me? What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t want you to
do
anything! It’s not about you doing something or some
one
.” Sniffles punctuated each sentence. “I just needed to tell somebody. I needed to tell
you
. Because sometimes I think it never happened. I start to think I made it all up, or it was a nightmare, or my fault. And I need to know that I’m not crazy, and to remember that it
was
real. And, for his own good, every time he looks at me, my father needs to know that I remember and that he’s responsible. But I need someone else to know and to help
me
to remember.”
“But, Shell, it’s sick. He’s sick. He needs help.”
“No. It’s not like that. It only happened once, and something good has come from it.”
“Oh, Christ! You’ve got to be kidding me. Do you even hear what you’re saying?”
“It was the drinking, and since that night, he hasn’t been drinking anymore. Besides, I don’t think he even meant it.”
“Didn’t mean it? You can’t be serious! You can’t accidentally … do that.”
“I
am
serious. My mother’s been dead for nearly my whole life. Since then my father has never”—she hesitated, searching for the appropriate euphemism—“
been with
another woman.”
“How do you even know that?”
“I just do. He misses my mother so much. I get that. It’s the only thing we’ve ever had in common. You’ve seen pictures of my mother, Gordon. You know how much I look like her. That night, I think he stumbled into my room by mistake.”
Gordon looked confused. “When was this?”
“Last October, the night of the Halloween dance. Remember? That was the night I was with Brandon Sullivan after the dance. I’m sure you heard the rumors.”
Gordon winced. “Aw, Shelly.”
“Anyway, when I sat up in bed, he called me by my mother’s name. I tried talking to him, telling him it was me, Shelly. I tried screaming. He didn’t listen or stop. He just kept calling me Mary, and … when he finished, he passed out on top of me.” She paused, remembering. “That was the worst part.” Shelly stared off into the darkness at the red lights of the marker buoys bobbing on the surface of the deep channel, traveled by the massive freighters that took on thousands of tons of coal at the Ogontz docks. “I couldn’t move him or get myself out from underneath him,” Shelly continued. “His weight pressed down on me. Alcohol oozed
from his pores and breath. The scruff of his beard scratched my face and neck. His … his … thing pressed sticky and wet between my thighs. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling and crying.”
“I don’t know what to say, Shell,” Gordon said.
“When he woke up, he must have been sober. He raised himself up and turned his face to look at me. For less than a second, I think he still thought I was his wife. Then—Gordon, if you could have seen his face—he recognized me and realized what he had done. He tried to say something; his lips quivered, but no words came out. He rolled off me and pulled up his pants with his back toward me. When he got to my bedroom door, he looked back as if to speak, but didn’t. We haven’t spoken a word to each other since. He won’t talk to me; he won’t come anywhere near me. Within weeks, he married Mary Jane, although he hardly knew her. I think it was his way of guarding against it ever happening again.”
There was a pause as Gordon tried to absorb what he’d heard, and Shelly dried her face with her shirt. A light, moist breeze began to blow across the bay, turning their arms and legs to gooseflesh. Above, the once dense cloud cover thinned, allowing the moon to emit a luminous glow.
“Wow,” he finally said. “I guess that explains the whole Plath phase.”
“But I’m better now,” Shelly said. “Way better.”
“Yeah. What’s up with the ‘shiny happy people’ routine?”
“Shut up, Gordon. Don’t make fun. You know I love that song.”
“I know it, but I’ll never accept it.”
“Do you remember that night—we were sitting right
here—when you told me about Annesley and how much you loved her?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Gordon said sheepishly, as if embarrassed by his short-lived romantic period.
“Well, now
I’m
in love, and I’m happy. I didn’t believe I
could
be this happy.”
Gordon’s gut didn’t wrench. His eyes didn’t turn green, nor his face red. Shelly said he seemed more disappointed than anything. She said it was simply as if Gordon could already see how it would end, and it wasn’t going to be good.
“I guess that explains it,” he said.
While Gordon had been gallivanting around Europe and Greece that summer, Shelly had been experiencing her own quixotic adventure. Her father’s guilt-inspired avoidance of her provided Shelly with carte blanche freedom of movement. What few limitations had ever existed on her comings and goings were completely lifted. No itineraries needed to be filed; no “check-in” phone calls placed; no curfews enforced. Generous amounts of spending money regularly appeared on her nightstand.
For her part, Mary Jane had abdicated any claim to parental authority long ago, when, shortly after she’d moved in with Claire and Frances, she’d asked Shelly to “do something about your appearance.” The black outfits, self-shorn hair, and black eyeliner were “bringing me down,” she’d said.