Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

“They pulled him off me. Earl made him watch while be fucked me. I was bleeding. It wasn’t my time, but I started anyway. They rubbed it on that boy, on his stomach and chest, and made me watch while they messed around with him, played with him and teased him till his cock got stiff. He was crying and begging them to let him loose but they kept messing with him. He laid there real quiet after a bit, whimpering like a puppy. They all laughed like crazy folks then and jerked him off. After he came, they messed his jizz with my body blood and smeared it on his face, said maybe that would make a man out of him. They let him up then but they made him sign a long paper saying he couldn’t fuck girls, that he was a queer and all. Everybody signed it, and Earl promised that he’d get everybody a copy...” Selby remembered that a priest at St. Ambrose had once expounded the proposition to him that “the existence of hell was irrefutable proof of the compassionate nature of mankind’s Heavenly Father.” Earl Thomson could have been his disciple.

“There’s not any more to tell,” Emma said, “except what that fucker Earl did then. He tied me up and he beat me like he was afraid to stop. He kept telling me how bad I was. That sounds crazy, I know, mister, but it’s true.

“I remember bein’ in a car, and then a field. It was cold. Half my clothes was off and my hands was still tied. A white man and woman found me, took me to a hospital. I don’t remember that part of it. Some doctor hadda pull my teeth out.

“The cops came and went to the school. But all them soldier boys was asleep in their bunks, nobody been anywhere that night. There was a little fuss. My daddy and the people who found me, the white folks, they thought something ought to be done. That’s when Slocum came over to the house and talked to me. He had a little wop fucker with him... I think Dom something. They showed me how beautiful black was, mister. They said I better be careful. My boss at The Letter Drop, he told me to listen to ’em. That Slocum, he says Earl was just funnin’ with me, nothing to cause trouble about. I wouldn’t sign a paper they wanted me to. I told that bastard Slocum and that dago prick to fuck off. So I lost my job. Boss said nobody’d want to look at me no more. My daddy, he was a welder, his boss got the word to him. Slocum said if I didn’t drop the charges, it would happen again, and my daddy would be watching. So then I signed what they wanted. Nobody cared I was pretty, I got pictures proving it, but that didn’t matter. Nobody cared about this little nigger. You don’t care, mister. What you doing here there, you big honky fucker, staring at me—?”

“Momma, stop. Please stop.”

Emma Green had been shouting. She took a deep breath and smiled shakily at Selby. “She is sweet, my Libby. No real daddy, but they set a store by her at school. This ain’t helping you, mister. That Earl’s crazy. He wanted to mess up daddy’s boss and the man owned The Letter Drop, never mind they lied and helped him. Tried to get that wop fucker to hurt them. You better go, hear?”

Selby nodded. He smiled a goodbye at Libby and turned to the door.

Emma Green said, “You ain’t gonna ask to look at my picture? See I wasn’t just braggin’?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“You ain’t no hustler, are you, man? You kind of dumb too.”

“Momma, stop talking that way.”

“Well, it’s the truth.” Emma Green was near tears. “He know if he looks at the picture and says how nice I look that I’ll be foolish crazy and write anything he wants. Don’t you know that, mister?”

“I’m not going to add to your problems, Emma.”

“Hey, I ain’t got only a few teeth left to get knocked loose anyway. Sit down, go ahead, sit, you and Libby can look at ’em together while I write it down.”

There were photographs of Emma Green and her friends in a pickup truck at a beach. A sheet was spread on the sand, held down at the corners by six-packs of beer. Others were of Emma in the stands of a highschool stadium, in backyards and porches, one of a teenage Emma standing with a laughing group in an arcade of pinball machines. Libby hung over the back of the chair, pointing over Selby’s shoulder, identifying her mother, naming friends she remembered hearing about.

Emma’s hair was black then. She was small and slim and pretty, with a direct, confident smile. Her daughter pointed to those pictures with particular pride, the ones where her mother was smiling and showing her perfect white teeth.

While Selby looked through the album, Emma Green put her drink aside and covered page after page in her daughter’s notebook with childishly round handwriting. She then told Libby to leave off studying the old pictures and go down to the church and get the minister and his wife.

Emma Green smiled tensely at Selby, not bothering to cover her damaged mouth. “I told you you shouldn’t fool us, mister. We too dumb for good fun. Look what I’m doing. I’m writing it all down about that fucker Earl. See what I mean about dumb? ”

Selby turned off the highway at an exchange near Camden and called home from a pay phone at a gas station.

It was late afternoon and overcast; it had taken the Reverend Elmer Davis, an efficient but simmeringly angry black man, almost two hours to type up Emma Green’s deposition and to have the documents duplicated, witnessed by his wife and Selby and notarized by a local bank officer.

At the end of the block was a small meadow covered with shallow water, natural terrain enclosed by industrial grime. Birds swam and fed among the stubby weed patches. Currents moved in sluggish waves over the sheaths of dirty ice. Fine for ducks, Casper would complain, if there weren’t so many cars and gas pumps and people around. But nothing would look very cheerful now, Selby knew, with the memories of her broken smile and the daughter’s shy goodbyes.

Mrs. Cranston answered his ring and told him she was glad he’d called. Not that anything was wrong. Davey was home from school and Miss Brett was driving Shana back from East Chester.

But a Sergeant Wilger phoned and wanted Mr. Selby to call him as soon as he could. She gave him a number Selby didn’t recognize. It wasn’t the Detective Division or Wilger s apartment.

He dialed and waited. From the booth he could see gas pumps, a littered street, rows of auto body and repair shops.

A phone was lifted. Wilger said, “Selby?”

“That’s right.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“I’m in a pay booth.”

“Okay, so am I. I didn’t want to use the office or my place. How’d it go?”

“She’s gun-shy, like you said. But I’ve got it in writing, witnessed and notarized. What good it will do is something else.”

“I called her place trying to get you but you’d left. Then I left a message at your home. I picked up something at the Hall you should know. Another of them funny links. Word is, the defense is bringing in a witness from Germany who’ll blow Brett’s case out of court. Also I heard the psychiatrist is testifying for Davic tomorrow and Brett told me it could be rough. So I had a double Scotch and thought screw Slocum. I’m going to the airport to see who else is interested in the GI from Frankfurt.”

“So you know who it is? Do you know his name?”

“Sure. He’s Derek Taggart, Ace Taggart from Rockland, General Adam Taggart’s son.”

The shore birds had settled in for the night; the cold, gray meadow was quiet.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Selby said. “I mean that.”

It was almost dark when he left the phone booth. A glare of traffic rose from the Camden Pike. A last fading light lay across the stretch of marshland, which spread like a cracked and smudged mirror under the gently drifting birds and frost-white weeds.