Chapter 7
In spite of the sergeant's promise, the word somehow got around. Even the next day people were looking queerly at me, and I didn't think it was all because of what had happened to me. When we boarded the buses for the trip home, I found myself sitting very much alone. Everyone was very carefully looking everywhere except at me.
My eyes were red from crying and loss of sleep. Rod had been taken away and I was alone. Maybe they only wanted to keep me from having hysterics, but I thought it was the first step in casting me out, in making me a pariah. All the talk was of what a good time we had had on Saturday and of what a shame it was that the trip had to be cut short, but I thought I heard whispers around me. I couldn't make them out, any more than I could the night before, but I suspected the worst. I was sure the rumors had started flying.
Mrs. Maury drove me home from the school. As we turned into the driveway the sounds of revelry floated out to us on the afternoon air. Suddenly I knew, and depression struck. An orgy was going full blast. My parents couldn't have heard the news.
My chaperone insisted on going in first. I hadn't the heart to stop her. Better that they know the rumors are true, I thought. Better that than everlasting suspicion.
Numbly, I sat in the car and watched her round the corner of the house. And I heard her scream of outraged astonishment.
She came running back, yanked open the door and hauled me out by the arm. "You! Do you know what they're doing in there? You cheap hussy! I wasn't sure I should believe those stories this morning. I didn't want to. But now! I'd like to see you all ridden out of this town on a rail! Poor Rod. Going to jail for defending a thing like you!"
Practically spitting in her fury, she threw my bag at me, flounced into her car and drove off, spraying gravel in her haste to leave such a den of iniquity behind. I remember that her upper lip was curled and her nose was wrinkled, as if she had smelled something rotten.
When I trudged into the yard with my overnight bag, even Charley recognized that it was not a time to stick around. He led the departure, with a wink and a leer for me as he went. Perhaps he thought it would cheer me.
When all had gone, I roused myself enough from my depression to tell my now-clothed parents, "They know. Everybody knows. Remember Bill, Papa? He tried to rape me last night. He did rape me. Rod caught him at it. But you don't know Rod, do you? He's my boy friend. We were in love. I never told him about Charley and the orgies and me. I thought he wouldn't love me if he knew. But now he knows. Bill told him. And he threatened to tell everybody unless Rod let him go on with the rape. So Rod beat him to death, and now he's in jail, and the police know, and someone's been spreading rumors, and Mrs. Maury saw you, and now everyone knows it's true."
I burst into tears and threw myself into my stepfather's arms. He cradled me, stroked my hair, tried to comfort me. He wasn't very successful. I wasn't crying for myself alone, but also for Rod and them.
Mama went for coffee. She thought it would sober us all up, meaning, I suppose, mainly them, but it would help bring me out of my mood, calm me so I could talk more reasonably. While she was gone, Papa continued to cuddle me, though my tears soaked his shirt, and cupped my breast gently, tentatively, with his hand, thumb rubbing the nipple through the thin fabric of my summer dress.
It helped a little. The conflicting sense of pleasure brought me to a greater awareness of myself, out of self-pity to sadness. I pushed his hand away, not really feeling much like that just then, but I also dried my tears and composed myself as best I could. My voice was still choked up, but the worst was over.
Mama returned with the steaming cups. As she handed us the coffee, she said, "Well, it's out. Maybe now we can get loose of that bastard."
"What do you want to get loose for?" snapped Papa. "You always seem to enjoy yourself pretty much."
"Oh, no, not the way you do," she retorted. "Imagine, seducing your own daughter for his sake! I'm just making the best of a bad deal. But now we can tell Charley to go screw himself for a change."
"Uh-uh, Harriet. No, we can't. You forget, he can still tell about Penny. He could make things a lot worse." He didn't look happy with the prospect.
"I don't care," I broke in, trying to help, trying to rise a little above my own troubles. "Things couldn't be any worse for me. Rod's gone. What does it matter to me what you do now?"
"No, no, honey. What would people think if they knew what we'd done to you? No, we can't run out on you."
We were silent for a moment, and then I told them, more calmly, about the night before. They wanted to know more about Rod, since I had never mentioned him in the past except as an occasional date. I hadn't wanted them pressing me to bring him home for dinner so they could meet him. Inevitably, if he had been made welcome, he would have come by some time when an orgy was going on. I explained all this, and they agreed that I may have been right, but that now Rod had surely shown that what mattered was me, not whatever I'd been forced into, not whatever my parents might be. And so it seemed, but he must have thought Bill had been lying. Why else would he have come to my defense? And what does he think now, now that he knows it's all true.
We went unhappily to bed that night: my parents full of foreboding, unsure of the future, of the way their neighbors would treat them, me in a mood of black depression, alone, deserted, my loving Rod out of reach behind cold bars, already beginning to feel the ostracism that scandal brings in a small town. I didn't, couldn't, blame Rod for it. It wasn't his fault, but mine. If only I could have done something about Bill myself earlier.
We were soon visited by the sheriff, who looked at and around us in a most peculiar way, as though he expected to see horns on our heads or nudes skulking in the background. He came, he said, to offer his condolences on my misfortunes, and to report that Rod was safely locked up, charged for the time being with murder. He didn't say anything about scandal, though he did ask about the absence of friends in the hour of our crisis. His smirk deserved a punch in the nose, but my father only answered that we wanted to be alone with our troubles. The sheriff got the message soon and left.
We soon found, however, that the sheriff hadn't gone far, for during the next few days we could often see him or one of his deputies watching our house. They didn't want to be seen: they lounged behind trees, slept in parked cars, drove by again and again in a disguised van, but on our quiet road extra traffic, an extra parked car, was all too obvious. They waited, but their patience wasn't enough to give them their vice raid.
My father's gas station business fell off sharply; people decided they would rather not patronize a known sex fiend.
When my mother went shopping people turned away from her. Some store clerks wouldn't even serve her, or they'd make her wait till last. She sometimes came home on the verge of tears, ready to curse me for falling in love, Papa for owing Charley, the world for being what it is.
I graduated in stony silence. No applause like that the others got, no praising or hopeful words from the principal handing out diplomas. Just a condemning glare. And more glares all around me. I was glad to get home, to be done with them forever. I thought that I could easily leave them all behind now. I had my diploma. But Rod didn't.
For his heinous crime they expelled him and denied him his diploma.
The situation was already intolerable when Rod's case came up for trial, but it was made impossibly worse when he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to a year in the state prison.
The worst thing about the trial was his father's sole appearance there. He came just once to speak to him, to tell him he was no longer welcome in his parents' home. They disowned him. No criminal would be tolerated in that family, no one who could kill, and kill for an excuse like me. Rod was heartbroken over this; I could hear his anguished cry from where I sat, a cry much softer than his father's words. And I could see his forlorn, beseeching look as his father left him.
I was in the courtroom when he was sentenced. I had been there throughout the trial; I had to be there, not just because I was a witness; I could not desert him.
I had sobbed out my testimony, following Charley's orders to keep his name out of it, ascribing all the details and initiative of the orgies to my parents, and I sobbed out my love for Rod when I clung to him after the verdict and the sentencing. I had kept away from him through most of the trial, not thinking myself able to face the condemnation I expected to meet. But when I approached him at the end, eyes red from weeks of tears, there was no sign of condemnation in his gaze; only a tender love.
"Don't worry, Penny," he murmured quietly. "It's only a year. Maybe less, if I behave myself."
"Oh, darling. How can you talk like that? Don't you hate me for getting you into this, for ... being what I am?"
"How could I, honey? People get in trouble all over the place. Yours is worse than most, I know, but still, it's not your fault. I just hope all this isn't too hard on you. People can be pretty nasty about something like this.
"I'd do it again, you know," he added. "It doesn't change the way I feel about you. I love you."
"Rod, Rod," I cried, my tears flooding forth afresh as I clung desperately to him. "I love you, too."
"Sorry, Miss." The bailiff touched my arm. "He has to go now. We have to take him away. Come on, Cramer."
They took him away. I watched, desolate, but cheered by his affirmation of love. I would wait! I would! It was wonderful to know he didn't care. But he was gone, imprisoned, because of me. I was still sad, but my parents noticed the difference when I turned back to them.
They were happy for me, happy that my doubts were answered. They had liked what they had seen of Rod too, and I think they would have been more than happy to see me marry him, then or when he was out of jail. I was young, and a year wasn't long to wait for happiness.
My lightened mood lasted only till we got home, though. As we drove into the yard, we were shocked to see, scrawled across the front of the house, on the door, the windows, the siding, epithets mocking our distress: "whores,"
"sex fiends,"
"get out of town before we run you out," and a noose hanging on the doorknob. They had taken advantage of the first time since the tragedy that we had all been out of the house together. No one was in sight, but we could feel their presence. We would definitely have to move.
Rod gone, because of me. Our neighbors hating us, because of me. Life was hardly worth living, for me, in spite of my renewed faith in Rod. I wished I could just go to sleep, awakening a year later to find him waiting.
My parents, too, were depressed. Papa looked dazed. He hadn't believed it could come to this. He'd known that revelation had to come some day, but not so soon, so severely.
But Mama had known. It had to come, eventually, and she wore a look of bitter triumph.
Our home was full of snaps and snarls as our ostracism sank in and frustration and depression shortened our tempers. When Charley called about two weeks after the trial to suggest another orgy, we welcomed it with almost hysterical relief. It would give us a break, let us drown our troubles in a sea of flesh, smother our loneliness in antic madness. That was the way we all saw it, at least, forgetting for the moment that this was the cause of our troubles and all the gaiety belonged to Charley, Jim, and Carrie. Still, we expected relief of a sort from it.
Charley, saying he wanted everyone sober later, put a stop to the drinking after lunch the day after I was introduced to Pig-eye's prowess. He didn't say why, but I thought it might have something to do with the business he had mentioned earlier. Indeed, it seemed I was right, for in the middle of the afternoon all the men disappeared, gathering in a conference room left over from the days when the house had been a hotel.
Shortly afterward, Oscar sent most of us to our rooms. Again, no explanation; we were to wait till called for. The only girls exempted were Heloise, who had been given to Hank, and three of the huskiest girls in our group, who, I knew, were among those who had been there the longest.
Natalie and I passed the waiting time wondering what was going on. We could hear nothing from the rest of the building or the grounds, and Natalie had seen nothing like this in the relatively short time she had been there, though that didn't stop our thoughts from naively imagining special varieties of sexual acrobatics or exotic punishments being visited on Hank for his supposed misbehavior.
However, with nothing but speculation to go on, we soon tired of the game and dozed off.
The rest of the weekend was quiet-just more of the same-poker and drinking and sex. I found the repetitiousness of their sodden lusts boring after a while. There was only crudity. Many positions, but one attitude, except for the incongruously named Pig-eye. Only he acted as if a girl were not a wash rag to be used, discarded, and laughed at. He may have used only one position, but he didn't use it callously. Only he had any gentleness in his soul, though it was well hidden from the casual eye.
Escape from boredom came only in his arms. His gentleness made me want to make him happy, and I tried, and seemed to succeed. He believed in giving as well as receiving, unlike Charley, whose grasping clutch left me cold. It seemed then that only Pig-eye stood between me and whatever fate had been given Heloise.
She never was seen again, and no explanation was ever offered. We had to assume that she'd been taken ill and confined to her room, keeping our suspicions to ourselves. The last we'd seen of her had been when she'd been singled out for the conference.
Only when all had left and we were again alone in our wilderness isolation did we hear an inkling of the truth. The word was passed, a rumor, yet more than rumor. By the time I heard the story it was full blown, rich in all the details of its decadent barbarism.
That business conference had been held to decide Hank's fate. He had transgressed against Charley and his organization in some unknown way. The sentence was death. The three were gravediggers, and when their job had been done, Hank had been garroted at the graveside. Harry, who, in rumor at least, was a doctor, had signed a death certificate saying: "heart attack." I remembered Charley's words with a shudder: "an undertaker and a doctor. We don't need to bother the town." Now those words crawled with ominous undertones.
Even there, the "system of bawder" had to be applied. The undertaker had to be paid. I remembered how hugely Kurt was hung: like a horse, or a bull, a bulging, splitting, battering ram of a man. Given over to Kurt, Heloise had been broken, split by his blunt cleaver, killed, her life drained out to the tune of his pulsing emissions, her body tossed atop Hank's coffin and buried with it.
On hearing this my stomach churned and I wondered if this was to be the way we all would go. Bled like a stuck pig at the whim of a tyrant. Was I to be denied my Rod again? I vowed never to give Charley the excuse he might want. Never would I let him play his cruel games with me. If it ever looked like this was in the cards, I hoped I would be able to run, let my future, such as it might be, go hang, and find Rod, if only for a day.
Kurt was the lowest kind of gangster. His face showed his obedience, his simple tastes, his lack of human sensibilities. He would never care about the woman's fate. Only he would matter, and his master. A brute, and his involvement in this monstrosity proved it.
I asked, and found that Kurt came with Charley every time, as bodyguard and executioner, though the latter services were only needed about once a year, and the tasks he performed then served as object lessons to keep, girls and men in line. I thought it remarkable that he, especially he, could stay in line so long himself. The frustration of denial, the burden of his priapic deformity, should have long ago driven him to rebellion, but a little thought showed me that, coupled with his brutish obedience, his very deformity might help him stay in line. After all, this was the only way he could ever hope to use his prodigious member. Perhaps gratitude for an outlet, however bestial, motivated his obedience and loyalty.
Life was quiet for some weeks after that party. The bizarre funeral had sobered us all and left us watching each other, and ourselves, trying to guess who would be next, and what she would do to deserve it. Our trembling worries ceased only after the second orgy of that winter, when Charley calmed us all by having no second funeral. We knew this meant nothing, that it was no reprieve, but it lent strength to the rumor that it only happened once a year, and that comforted us.
Relief made us all much more lively at this orgy, though except for our greater attention to business, it was much the same as the last. We were so attentive, in fact, that no one earned any censure.
To me, the most important thing that happened was that Pig-eye, again my partner (I think he must have asked for me, since few others repeated their matches), took me into his confidence.
We were in bed the second night of the party and had just finished making love. He must have decided I could be trusted, unlike some of the other girls who, I was sure, would not be above currying favor with Charley. As we lay side by side, snuggled together in the languorous quiet of the aftermath, he began to speak.
"This is quite a set-up Charley has here, don't you think, Penny?" Ever since the last orgy I had been suspicious, sensitive to every nuance around me, and, though his voice was slow and lazy, and might only have been tired from our lovemaking, I thought he might be testing me.
"For some people, maybe," I replied cautiously. "I don't like it. I'd rather be free, doing things my own way, without someone always ready to tell me what to do, and without Kurt around." Trepidation at my sudden daring made me watchful. How would he take it?
"You don't like Kurt." It was a statement. "Not many of us do. Charley's happy to have him around though, good for discipline, keeps the boys in line. Keeps him nicely protected, too." Was he really on my side?
I ventured, questing. "Charley's not so hot either."
"Oh, yeah. You girls all come through him, don't you?"
"Uh-huh. Him and Carrie." I could feel the jubilation creeping up on me. Perhaps Pig-eye could help me get out of there, help me plan, protect me when I was out.
"I don't like 'em either, but what can you do? He knows where all the skeletons are buried, and the only other one who knows is Carrie. He knows where the money is, that's for sure, and I guess that's why the guys hook up with him, but he sure is rough on the people around him." He didn't sound ready to help, and I didn't dare pursue the questions he raised. Too much might scare him, send him to Charley, in spite of his obvious liking for me. I didn't think he was just leading me on, but I had to worry.
"I wish somebody would get rid of him, him and Carrie, both." I sounded plaintive, and he looked curiously at me, as if to say, "What's your special gripe?" Though he hadn't put it into words, I answered. "He caught my parents with a loan, and then he got them to have an orgy with him instead of paying. Then he had them with that and he got me, too. And all because of that, my boy friend's in jail."
"Yeah, he works that way, and it's ugly. If only there were some way to get rid of both of them."
We lay still then, thinking our separate thoughts. I had the beginnings of a plan-a vile, effective plan. He, well, he began to snore as I turned with words of hope on my tongue. Let him snore, I thought. It's probably best to keep it to myself. Then I can spring it on them all. It'll be a big surprise, but my time will come.