Andrew Vachss - Flood

She did something at her waist, and the silky pants floated to the floor. I was right-it was a bodysuit underneath. She stepped away from the shiny puddle at her feet, bent in half at the waist and I heard the snaps pop on the bodysuit. She pulled the suit over her head in one motion and tossed it gently on top of her pants. Her bra and panties were of some smooth material that matched; the combination looked more like a fairly modest bathing suit than underwear. She hooked her thumbs inside the waistband of the pants and slid them down and off, one leg at a time. I just sat there watching, not smoking now. She stood there for a moment, hands on hips, staring down at me. She looked like a lot of things to me then, but vulnerable wasn’t any of them. She turned slowly to her right, half her back on the left side coming into view. Even her rump looked like muscle covered with pale skin. I heard my own breathing.

She kept turning until she was facing completely away from me, and then I saw it-halfway down the right cheek and partway down her thigh was a dark red stain-the skin under the stain was raised and rough. I knew what it was instantly-fire scars. She bent forward slightly as if to show me the whole thing, then turned back until she was facing me again. She walked over until she was right in front of my face and turned again. The scar was ragged and uneven as though she had sat down in a fireplace-not a surgeon’s work. Maybe skin grafts would have worked years ago, but it clearly was too late now. When she turned again to look at me, I nodded to show I understood what it was. She walked away from me toward the bathroom. The scars didn’t affect the muscles underneath. She walked with that independent, up-and-down movement of her cheeks that even most strippers never get right. I sat there looking at the puddle of her discarded clothes and heard the hiss of spray. She didn’t sing in the shower.

She came out in a few minutes wearing a yellow terrycloth robe, gathered the pile of clothes from the floor and threw them in a large wicker basket near the dresser. Then she came over and sat down next to me. It was dark in her place, but the white walls from the studio bounced enough light inside for me to see her face. I lit another cigarette and she began to talk.

“I don’t remember much about my mother, but I know I was taken away from her when I was just a little kid. I lived in foster homes at first, but then they put me in an institution when the family that had me moved out of the state. When I was fourteen, they found another foster home for me, and they let me out to go live there. The man in that home raped me. I told the social workers and they asked him about it. He said that we had sex, but that I had come on to him and he couldn’t help himself. He went into therapy, I went into a home for girls. I ran away and they caught me. I kept running away. I always got caught after a while, and they’d put me in an empty room with nothing in it, not even a book to read. The social workers told me it was all right to be sad, but not to be angry. It wasn’t healthy.”

She took a deep breath. “I had a friend, my best and greatest friend ever. Her name was Sadie. Her mother was Jewish and her father was black. She was so smart. She told me she wouldn’t have ever been put in the institution except that she wasn’t fashionable. I never understood that, at first. But she was my friend. We did everything together. We always shared. Everything. We fought the bull dykes together and the matrons too. I didn’t know how to fight then, but I was strong and I was always angry. Sadie couldn’t fight at all but she always tried. Once they put us in the Quiet Room for two weeks together and it only made us closer-better than sisters, because we decided. We ran away together once, to New York. We wanted to go to the Village. Sadie met this guy on a motorcycle who said he had a crash pad where kids could stay. I didn’t trust him-I didn’t trust anyone. But Sadie had charm. She said even if he was a bad guy, he wouldn’t have to be bad to us. I never had charm.”

An expression I couldn’t read flashed across her face and she went on, “We went with him and he was nice at first. But that same night, he brought in some other men from his pack. They told us to take off our clothes and dance for them. We wouldn’t. I could have gotten away, but I fought them with Sadie. I broke a bottle and cut one of them in the face. They beat us, badly. When I woke up, there was an old man there with a suitcase. He was arguing with the pack. He said something about how he couldn’t do it-we were too young. One of the pack came over to us and said he was sorry for what the others had done. He said the man was a doctor and he’d fix us up. He gave us each something to drink. I don’t remember anything except reaching for Sadie before I passed out.

“When I came to, I saw Sadie lying next to me. We still had no clothes on and Sadie was bleeding between her legs. I checked, but I wasn’t. My whole face was swollen so bad I could hardly talk. I think it was another day or so before we both really woke up. There was a dirty bandage on my hip, one on Sadie’s too. I thought it was maybe where the doctor gave us a shot, but it was a big bandage. I crawled out into the hall. The pack was all asleep in the next room. It was like a cave of devils-filthy and smelly. Sadie and I found some clothes and we made it down the stairs. A policeman found us, and took us to a place for runaways because Sadie told him we were sisters from Ohio. She was smart-I couldn’t think of anything to say. When they took the bandages off in the runaway place to give us showers, we saw what they had done, why they brought the old man up there. We each had a tattoo on our bottoms. Just the name of that pack, but a real tattoo. When I saw it on Sadie, I cried for the first time in years. She cried too. The nurse at the runaway place told us that they were permanent-they would never come off. When they left Sadie and me alone, we talked-and we decided what we had to do. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t care anymore after what they did to us.

“Sadie and I just walked out of the runaway place. They didn’t even try to stop us. Sadie panhandled in the Village until we got some money, then we bought four of those five-gallon cans and went to a gas station and filled them up. We just sat outside that building where the pack was until it was late at night and then we went upstairs. The pack was all zonked out on booze and dope. It was easy. Sadie and I knew what would happen to us, but it didn’t matter. We poured the gasoline all over the place-all over those sleeping devils. Then we each lit matches and threw them into the gas. We didn’t even run out of the building, just walked away. They screamed a lot-I wish I could have been there to see them. The papers said eleven people died. No people died. They weren’t people. It could have been eleven hundred for all we cared.

“Then Sadie and I went to this flophouse. We paid for the room with what was left of the panhandling money and walked right upstairs carrying one of the cans with a little gasoline left in it. In that room, we kept our promises to each other. We took off our clothes and we laid down on our stomachs and we poured gasoline over each other’s bottoms. We had the sheets all soaked in water, like a swamp. We said that we loved each other. We knew we couldn’t make any noise or it wouldn’t work. I kissed her. We were crying, but we did it. We put some of the wet sheets in our mouths, and we held hands and we lit the matches and put them on ourselves. We said we would count to ten before we rolled over onto the sheets. Sadie tried, but she pulled away before I got to three in my head. I held onto her like I promised-she fought me, but I held on. We rolled onto the sheets and spit the mess out of our mouths and it was okay to scream then. The cops got us when they came to the flophouse. They said we were too young to be tried as adults. We knew that before, but it wouldn’t have made any difference.