The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (38 page)

Day after day the ritual was repeated until dog and girl could stare at each other without fright. After a while, de Jong could trust the dogs to approach the cage unleashed. And then, at last, when the girl was ready to be taken out, the dogs ran beside her without incident.

“Master,” Grace said, “I can’t make her stand straight like you said. She still wants to bend over like a baboon. I think she was living with the baboons over there. I think she can still be like them.”

De Jong smiled down at the girl. Thick black curls were beginning to cover her head. And her face was beginning to reveal itself, the nose long and straight, a high forehead, small ears, olive skin and the wide black eyes of a gypsy. Considering only the head, she could be any child, any dark, silent girl, no breasts yet, no body hair either. If she still stooped, what difference would it make? She was ready, baboons or no baboons, he could see it in the way she looked at him. It was Grace who was trying to hold her back for some reason.

“You’ll bring her to me tomorrow evening,” he said, “the usual hour.”

Grace bowed her head. Usually, she was only too glad to hand a girl over because then she’d have her two weeks off. When she did return, as often as not the girl would be over the first fright of it. So what had come over her this time? “Maybe a few more days?” she said.

He smiled at Grace. It was almost as if she’d known from the start how it would be with this girl. And now that he was taking pride—well, not so much pride in the girl herself as in the things she could do, the way he could make her obey him—now that he
was waking each morning to the thought of what he might make the girl do for him next, now came Grace with her suggestions.

“She does not even have a name yet,” Grace said.

They were walking down to the river, which the girl always liked to do. Once he’d thought he heard her laugh—laugh or bark, it was hard to tell which. The sun was shining brilliantly on the muddy water, and she’d looked up into his face, her mouth and eyes wide. And then, freeing her hand from his, she’d bounded down the hill with the dogs, down to the water’s edge.

“Tomorrow evening. In the atrium. The usual time.”

Grace had dressed the girl in a simple silk shift. There was a pool in the middle of the atrium, with a fountain at its center. Most of the girls couldn’t swim, but the pool was shallow, and he’d be sitting in it, naked, waiting for them with his glass of whiskey. The girls themselves always stopped at the sight of him there, the pink shoulders and small gray eyes. And then he’d rise out of the water like a sea monster and they’d make a run for it, every one of them, never mind how much Grace had told them there was no way out.

Men in the village liked to say they’d come to the house one night and cut off his manhood like a pawpaw. But Grace knew it was all talk. Without his money, where would they all be? Where would she be herself? The Master himself knew that, standing there, shameless, before her. But when he had finished with this one, where would she go? Usually, they’d run home with the money, and then, sooner or later, they’d be back at the kitchen door, wanting work. But what about this one? Where
could
she go except back to the baboons?

Quickly, Grace turned and walked out of the atrium.

He held his hand out to the girl, but she didn’t take it. She was leaning over the low wall, splashing one hand into the water. He caught it in his own then, and took her under the arms and lifted
her in. She didn’t struggle, she was used to his lifting her here or there. But this time he was lifting her dress off her too, throwing it aside. She wasn’t wearing any panties, he never wanted them wearing panties when they came to him. So now there was nothing but her smooth olive skin. He ran his hands down her sides and cupped one around each buttock—small and round and girlish, the rest of the body muscled like a boy’s.

She let him coax her down into the water, lapping at it happily. And when he moved one hand between her legs, she just glanced down there through the water with the frown she always wore when Grace tried to show her how to wipe herself after she’d used the toilet. But he was stroking her, prodding into her with a finger so that she jumped away and stared hard at him. And still he came after her, taking her by the arms before she could scramble up onto the fountain. He was pushing her backward to the side of the pool and his smile was gone, he was holding her arms wide so that he could force his knee between her legs.

Caught like that, she slammed her head wildly then from side to side against the edge of the tiles, shrieking piteously. A trickle of blood ran down her neck, and when at last he had her legs apart and was thrusting himself into her, she was bleeding there too. He knew from her narrowness that she’d be bleeding properly when he’d finished with her, that her blood would cloud out beautifully into the pool, turning from red to pink. It was the moment he longed for with every new offering, first the front, then the back, and always the mouths open in astonishment like this, the eyes wild and pleading, and for what? For more? More?

By the time he was finished with her and resting his head against the side of the pool, she was moaning. They all moaned like this, and what did they expect? What did this one expect after all these months she’d kept him waiting with her grunts and squawks? He stretched out an arm to grab her neck. Usually that’s all it took to shut them up. If it didn’t, he’d duck them under the water until they were ready to listen. “Quiet,” he’d croon in his
deep, soft voice. And if that didn’t work, he did it again, and for longer. “Do you hear me now?” he’d whisper. “I said quiet!”

But with this one words were useless. And just as he was about to push her under, she slipped free, twirling herself into the air, twisting, leaping, springing out of reach until, at last, he had caught her by an arm. But then she only doubled back, sinking her teeth into his wrist, and, when he’d let her go, into an ear, and, at last, as his hands flew to his head, she took his throat between her jaws. And there she hung on like a wild dog, only tightening her bite as he bucked and flailed for air. But the more he struggled the deeper she bit, never loosening her jaws until he was past the pain, past the panic. Only then, only after the last damp gurgling of breath had left him limp, did she rip away the flesh and gristle she’d got hold of, and, gulping it down as she ran, leap out through an open window.

When they came in with the tea things, the whole pool was pink, pinker than they’d ever seen it, even the fountain. At first they just stood there, staring at what was left of his throat. But then they remembered the girl, and they ran, one for a kitchen knife, another to lock the doors and windows of the house.

But she never returned. And the generations that followed were inclined to laugh at the whole idea of a baboon girl—of
any
girl killing that demon like a leopard or a lion. They were inclined to doubt the demon himself as well. Surely someone would have reported him to the authorities? they said. Surely one of his girls would have told her story to the papers?

T
his was his life now, his real life, the thing he thought about most: his boy was in and out of trouble and he didn’t know what to do.

Friday night when he got home late from the mill Daisy made him shower before supper, and he twisted the dial to its hottest setting and turned his back to the expensive showerhead whose spray never pulsed hard enough to perform the virtual massage its advertising promised—or maybe at forty-three he’d used his body too hard, its aches and pains as much a part of him now as his heart or any other organ, and he had wasted good money on an illusion. Ah well. He rubbed at mirror fog and told the dark-browed frowner (his own father!) to get ready: she’d had her Victor look. Whatever this development was, it fell somewhere between failing grade in calculus and car wreck, either of which, he knows from experience, would have been announced as soon as he walked through the door. This news, while it wasn’t life or death, was bad enough that she felt she needed to lay the groundwork and had already set their places at the table and poured his beer, a habit he disliked but had never objected to and never
would. As a special treat Daisy’s father had let her tilt the bottle over his glass while the bubbles churned and the foam puffed like a mushroom cap sidling up from dank earth, and if she enjoyed some echo of the bliss of being in her daddy’s good graces while pouring
his
beer, Sean wasn’t about to deprive her of that.

Daisy told him:

Neither girl seemed very brave, yet neither seemed willing to back down. Not their own wounds but a sturdy sense of each other’s being wronged had driven them to this. They had a kind of punk bravado, there on the threshold, armored in motorcycle jackets whose sleeves fell past their chipped black fingernails. A flight of barrettes had attacked their heads and seized random tufts of dirty hair. Dressed for audacity, but their pointy-chinned faces—really the same face twice—wore the stiff little mime smiles of the easily intimidated, confronting her, the tigress mother, bracing their forlorn selves as best they could, which wasn’t very well at all. There was nothing to do but ask them in. As she told it to Sean, Daisy wasn’t about to let them guess that (a) she pitied them, and (b) she understood right away there was going to be some truth in what they said. Victor’s favorite sweater, needing some mending, lay across the arm of the sofa, and when one of the twins took it into her lap, talisman, claim, Daisy hardly needed to be told that girl was pregnant. As the twins took turns explaining not just one of them was in trouble, both were, an evil radiance pulsed in the corner of Daisy’s right eye, the onset of a migraine.

A joke
, Sean said.
Because, twins? Somebody told these girls to go to V’s house and freak out his parents
.

Drinking around a bonfire and they wander deeper into the woods and they came across this mattress and it’s like a sign to them. Sign is what they said. Does that sound like a joke to you? They have a word for it. Threeway. They have a word for it. Ask yourself what these girls know, what they’ve ever taken care of in their lives. Who’s ever taken them seriously? We will. We will, now
. Across the table Sean shook
his head, his heavy disgust with his son failing, for once, to galvanize Daisy’s defense of the boy. In the appalled harmony of their anger they traded predictions. Victor would be made to marry a twin, maybe the one whose dark eyes acquired a sheen of tears when she petted his old sweater, because she seemed the more lost. Victor would be dragged under.

“When’s he get home?” Sean said.

“Away game. Not till two a.m.” It was Daisy who would be waiting in her SUV when the bus pulled up at the high school to disgorge the sleepy jostling long-legged boys.

“We hold off on doing anything till we hear his side of the story.”

We hold off?
If she hadn’t loved him she would have laughed when he said that. It wasn’t going to be up to them to hold off or not hold off, but if Sean was slower to accept that reality than she was, it was because he hated decisions being out of his hands.

However disgusted he’d been the night before, in the morning Sean was somber, concerned, protective, everything Daisy could have wished when he sat Victor down at the kitchen table for what he called
getting the facts straight
. The reeling daylong party was true, and the bonfire, and the rain-sodden mattress in the woods where a drunken Victor had sex with both girls, though not at the same time, which was what
threeway
meant. They must have claimed that for dramatic impact, as if this thing needed more drama, or because they were so smashed events blurred together in their minds. The next several evenings were taken up with marathon phone calls—Sean asked most of the questions and wouldn’t hand the receiver to Daisy even when she could tell he’d been told something especially troubling and mouthed
Give it to me!
By the following weekend they knew for sure only one twin was pregnant, though it seemed both had believed they were telling the truth when they sat on Daisy’s striped couch and said the babies, plural, were due July fifth. The sweater-petting girl told Sean she had liked Victor for a long time
—years
—and had
wanted to
be
with him, though not in the way it had finally happened, and when he heard this Sean coughed and his eyes got wet, but
who were those tears for?
Daisy wanted to know.
Not for his own kid, for those girls?
Questioned, Victor remembered only that they were twins. He knew it sounded bad but he wasn’t sure what they looked like. Nobody was quote in love with him: that was crazy. And no, they hadn’t tried to talk to him first, before coming to the house, and was that fair, that they’d assumed there was zero chance of his doing the right thing? And why was marriage the right thing if he didn’t want it and whoever the girl was
she
didn’t want it and it was only going to end in divorce? The twin who was pregnant had the ridiculous name of Esme, and what she asked for on the phone with Sean—patient, tolerant Sean—was not marriage but child support. If she had that she could get by, she insisted. She’d had a sonogram and she loved the alien-headed letter C curled up inside her. At their graduation dance she shed her high heels and flirted by bumping into the tuxes of various dance partners. Victor followed her into the parking lot. Below she was flat-footed and pumpkin-bellied, above she wore strapless satin, her collarbones stark as deer antlers when he backed her up against an anonymous SUV hard enough their first sober kiss began with shrieks and whistles.

In the hushed joyous days after the baby was born Sean made a serious mistake that he blamed partly on sleep deprivation; the narrow old two-story house had hardly any soundproofing, and because Victor and Esme’s bedroom was below his and Daisy’s, the baby’s crying woke them all. He had stopped in the one jewelry store downtown and completely on impulse laid down his credit card for a delicate bracelet consisting of several strands of silver wound around and around each other. Though simple, the bracelet was a compelling object with a strong suggestion of narrative, as if the maker had been trying to fashion the twining, gleaming progress of several competing loves. He was the sort of
husband who gets teased for not noticing new earrings even when his wife repeatedly tucks her hair behind her ears, and any kind of whimsical expenditure was unlike him, but he found he couldn’t leave the store without it. He stopped for a beer at the Golden West, and when he got home the only light was from the kitchen, where Esme sat at the table licking the filling from Oreos and washing it down with chocolate milk. Her smile hoped he would empathize with the joke of her appetite rather than scold the late-night sugar extravaganza as, he supposed, Daisy would have done, but it was the white-trash forlornness of her feast that got to Sean—the cheapness and furtiveness and excessive, teeth-aching sweetness of this stab at self-consolation. With her china-doll hair and whiter-than-white skin she was hardly the menace to their peace they had feared, only an ignorant girl who trusted neither her baby’s father nor her sneaky conviction that it was she and not the grandmother who ought to be making the big decisions about the baby’s care. Esme wet a forefinger and dabbed the crumbs from Daisy’s tablecloth as he set the shiny box down next to her dirty plate. She said, “What is this?” and, that fast, there were tears in her eyes. She didn’t believe it was for her, but she’d just understood what it would feel like if the little box
had
been hers, and this disbelief was his undoing: until those tears he had honestly had no notion of giving Esme the bracelet. He heard himself say, “Just something for the new mama.” As soon as she picked the ribbon apart, even before she tipped the bracelet from its mattress of cotton, he regretted his impulsiveness, but it was too late: she slid it onto her wrist and made it flash in the dim light, glancing to invite his admiration or maybe try to figure out, from his expression, what was going on. In the following days he was sorry to see that she never took it off. Luckily the household was agitated enough that nobody else noticed the bracelet, and he began to hope his mistake would have no ill consequences except for the change in Esme, whose corner-tilted eyes held his whenever he came into the room. Then, quick, she’d turn her head as if realizing
this was the sort of thing that could give them away. Of course there was no
them
and not a fucking thing to give away. Sean began to blame her for his uneasiness: she had misconstrued an act of minor, impulsive charity, blown it up into something more, which had to be kept secret. The ridiculousness of her believing he was
interested was
not only troubling in its own right, it pointed to her readiness to immerse herself in fantasy, and this could be proof of some deeper instability. He didn’t like being looked at like that in his own house, or keeping secrets. He was not a natural secret keeper, but a big-boned straightforward husband. Since he’d been nineteen, a husband. Daisy came from a rough background too, her father a part-time carpenter and full-time drunk who had once burned his kids’ clothes in the backyard, the boys running back into the house for more armfuls of T-shirts and shorts, disenchanted only when their dad made them strip off their cowboy pajamas and throw those in too. The first volunteer fireman on the scene dressed the boys in slickers that reached to their ankles and bundled their naked teeth-chattering sister into an old sweater that stank of crankcase oil, and to this day when Sean changes the oil in his truck he has to scrub his hands outside or Daisy will run to the bathroom to throw up.