Robert Tanenbaum: Fury

The firecracker went off again. Then again. She drifted in and out of consciousness. Faces appeared. Some angry. Some frightened. Voices taunted her and urged each other to…violate her. "Yo, Des, your turn." Their voices sounded like crows in the cornfields of Iowa, where she'd grown up before she'd moved to New York to become a writer, fell in love at a Fleetwood Mac concert, married, had a baby, and named her Rhiannon.

"Fuck her, homes, ain't you a man?" There was a terrible pain on her right breast. She heard herself scream, but it sounded as if it was coming from some other woman.

There was a moment's respite. Then the first boy spoke again. "Hey, ratface, you want some of this bitch?"

Another voice entered her head. An evil voice, laced with malice. "Show you boys how to treat these bitches," the voice said. "If you want to teach them a real lesson, you got to fuck them dirty."

A man with a pockmarked face and foul, rotting breath leaned over and grinned in her face. Someone rolled her over. She felt the cool sand on her shattered face; it felt good and she wondered if these boys would now allow her to die. But the nightmare wasn't over. She felt herself penetrated again, ashamed to be used so horribly. Filthy, dirty, so much shame that she welcomed the new blows to her head, hoping that they would put her out of her misery. Die, she told herself.

In the distance, sirens wailed. The boys shouted words of alarm, indistinguishable from the screams of the seagulls and the whispering condolences of the waves.

Then the monsters were gone. She felt their running footsteps recede across the sand as she waited for death to release her from the humiliation and pain. But death was not so kind.

Slowly, painfully, she rose to her knees, then to her feet. She couldn't see much, just a light and a green moving field she knew was the water. Dirty. Filthy. She had only one desire-to cleanse herself before she let the sea take her.

They found her standing in the water up to her waist, scrubbing furiously between her legs, trying to wash away the shame of what the monsters had done to her. Someone summoned a police officer, who waded into the water to escort her back to shore.

When he got close, he had to look away for a moment to compose himself. Her face was covered by a sheet of blood, her left eye swollen shut, her right eye hanging half out of its socket. Her lips were split, a black hole where her front teeth had been.

She screamed when he first reached out for her arm and pulled away from him. "Please, ma'am, let me help you to someplace safe."

Turning a sightless face toward the officer, she'd cried, "Don't you know, there's no such place!"

Friday, December 10

Hugh Louis shifted uncomfortably in the chair next to the desk of the television talk-show host. He'd once played tight end for the semipro New Jersey Packers football team as he worked his way through law school. But those days were more than twenty years under the bridge, and the chair complained like a bitter housewife beneath his bulk.

As he waited for the taping to begin, Louis mopped away with a handkerchief at the interlocking streams and tributaries of sweat that coursed over his broad face. The stage crew bustled around, including an intent young woman who dabbed away at his host, Natalie Fitz, with last-minute applications of makeup to disguise encroaching wrinkles and a chronic fatigue that had settled in when she realized some years before that her chances of anchoring network news were slim and none.

Unless, she thought with a glance toward Louis, making nice with this fat shyster gets me an Emmy. Then who knows, maybe not the evening spot but one of the news magazines or a morning show. She turned up the wattage on her smile when Louis caught her looking. He returned it with the same show of teeth and lack of sincerity.

The other reason for Louis's prodigious amount of sweat was that he always started producing it when he was preparing to lie. It didn't matter that he lied all the time and, in fact, had made it the hallmark of his legal career. But his body never had gotten used to going along with what his mouth was saying. He guessed it had something to do with the strict Baptist upbringing his dear departed mother had beat into him while he was growing up poor and black in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

"Damn, it's hot in here. You folks never hear of air-conditioning?" he said to Fitz, adding a chuckle just to let her know he meant it in a friendly way. Like hell I do, he thought. Bitch probably had them turn up the heat to put me in my place. Well, won't be long, and I won't need the skinny old bag. Then we'll see who turns up the heat.

Louis never worried about the ethics of lying. He'd hated his mother and despised her for working at menial jobs-and for being dark as roasted coffee beans, whereas he'd inherited the milk-chocolate complexion of the father he'd never met.

As a kid, he'd dreamed of the day he could leave Bed-Stuy and his mother. Fortunately, his size and an early athleticism had been enough to get him a football scholarship at a small Virginia college. He'd hoped for an NFL career but an affection for fast food had buried whatever slim chance he had beneath rolls of fat. So he'd accepted his "wink and a nod" diploma given to less-than-deserving athletes at the school and moved on to Plan B. His mother had wanted him to join the ministry. "Like hell I will," he told her. "I'm going for where the jack is; I'm going to be a lawyer."

Subsequently, he'd been turned down by the finest law schools in the land. But a small, nondescript institution in New Jersey that faced probation with the national law school accreditation board had happily accepted him under its "nontraditional students" program and had even given him a partial scholarship. The Packers (regrettably not the team in Wisconsin) had paid him enough to handle the rest. He'd graduated with a law degree mostly by cheating and plagiarizing. But he'd already developed a reputation for playing the race card when things weren't going his way, so none of his professors were about to challenge him lest they find themselves defending a lawsuit instead of teaching about them.

Louis had perfected the art of sliding through holes to advance himself. He took and passed his bar exam in New York under a program that allowed for a certain amount of leniency for minority students, "recognizing that these tests have certain cultural biases that preclude such students from a fair opportunity."

His luck continued when he was snapped up by a mid-Manhattan white-shoe firm looking to enhance its positioning in the black community. He'd put in his time, taking advantage of his status as one of three young lawyers of color to work half as much as the young white attorneys, and for that matter, the other two minority colleagues. But then he'd noticed that while his color bought him a certain favoritism among the peons, he wasn't going to go much farther up the totem pole. The firm had only one black partner-an older, quiet, Harvard-educated tax attorney named Harvey Adams, who was about as black, in terms of how even he viewed himself, as Donald Trump.

Adams had been added to the partners list the same year that Louis was born. It dawned on Louis that he might be Adams's age before the next black would gain that distinction, so he'd quit to hang his shingle in Harlem and took his constituency with him.

When the firm's partners complained that he'd signed a no-competition contract and therefore had to return their clients to the firm's fold, Louis had gone to the newspapers and cried racism. The big white bully-who by the way had a glass ceiling when it came to minority partners-was trying to prevent the oppressed, young black victim from succeeding. It was his first experience with cultivating the media, which loved a race baiter nearly as much as it loved serial killers, adulterous politicians, and dirty cops. He rather enjoyed the experience and promised himself to employ the technique whenever necessary to achieve his ends.