Andrew Vachss - Only Child

“She’s right,” Rejji said over her shoulder, from the corner where she was standing. “And that’s part of the word on you, too.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked them both.

“You got it bad for...certain kinds of people.”

“Gresham was just a freak. Nothing personal. A job. I didn’t feel anything for her.”

“You felt something for us, ” Cyn said. “Tell the truth.”

“That’s me, all right, Cyn. A knight in shining armor.”

“Oh, you’ve got plenty of armor, all right,” Rejji said.

“Somehow, I never pictured you as a sports nut,” Cyn said later.

“You ever watch this?” I asked her, pointed at the screen where Bryant Gumbel’s Real Sports was running on HBO.

“No. We don’t like—”

“Shut up and give it a chance.”

“Ooo! You better do it, Cyn,” Rejji teased. “You know what Burke’ll do if you’re a bad girl.”

“You silly...” Cyn stopped herself, caught by the images on the screen. Children playing baseball together. Lots of children, with all kinds of disabilities. Blind, in wheelchairs, brittle-bone syndrome, muscular dystrophy. Something they called the “Miracle League,” organized by a bunch of parents who just wanted to give the kids a chance to play. Each kid had a special buddy, another kid, an athlete who went every step of the way with the kid who needed it, from helping to hold a bat to pushing a wheelchair around the bases.

Rejji came over to see what we were looking at. She sat down, and watched, transfixed, until it was over.

“Some people,” she said, choked up, “they...they torture their own kids. And these ones, they...”

“Makes you think there’s two different species, huh?” I said.

“There are,” Cyn said, holding Rejji’s hand.

Ispent the next day working the phones. Calling in favors. Hard to do secondhand, but Mama was an ace at relays.

The strip mall a few minutes away had a halfway-decent deli. I had them make me a rare roast beef on rye with a slice of red onion and Russian dressing. A side of potato salad, and a bottle of Dr. Brown’s black cherry. Picked up a copy of the Post, took it all back to my room, and sat down to watch the news.

It was the usual mulch. My eyes drifted back to the paper. I was deep into a self-righteous article about “unprovoked” shark attacks when the TV suddenly blurted something about a “daring daylight assassination” of a “known mob figure.” I dropped the paper, upped the volume. The victim had been sitting at the wheel of his white Cadillac SUV—in a no-standing zone in midtown, the announcer said, as if this confirmed some significant point—when someone walked by and put a single slug into his left ear. A police spokesman solemnly announced it “had all the trademarks of a professional killing.”

It had gone down in broad daylight. Nobody had seen or heard a thing, not even the SUV’s passenger. He had just stepped into a local store for a few minutes, asking the driver to wait. Found the body when he came back out.

The screen showed a close-up photo of the dead man. He had a round face that made his little eyes look even smaller. The announcer asked anyone with information to call a special number the cops had set up. The name of the victim was in bold black type beneath his photo. Vincente “Colto” Zandrazzi.

Iwas still watching television, thinking maybe the late news would have more on the killing, when the connecting door between our rooms opened and Rejji crawled in.

She came over to where I was sitting, said, “Cyn told me I had to—”

“You don’t have to do anyth—”

“I need to tell you a secret,” she said. “Please?”

“Rejji, I don’t want—”

“I know . Please...?”

“What?”

She crawled over to the TV set, poked around until she found the switch, turned it off. The room went into darkness, except for the light spilling from the connecting door.

She crawled back to where I was sitting. “I have to stand up to tell you, all right?”

“Sure.”

She stood up, bent over so her lips were right against my ear. I thought of Colto.

“I want to do this,” she whispered. “I want to see what it feels like. I want to know. But I can’t just...Cyn has to make me. But not really. You know what I’m...”

“What about me?” I asked her.

“What?”

“What do I want to do, Rejji?”

“Do me, ” she whispered.

“Not with—”

“She won’t come in,” Rejji said. “And I won’t look.”

“Uh! Uh! Uh!”

Rejji, on her hands and knees, blindfolded, making an explosive little noise, somewhere between a grunt and a squeal.

I was right behind her.

“Don’t untie me,” she whispered, dropping her shoulders to the bed. “Not yet, okay?”

“It was like...a string of little firecrackers, going off in me.”

“Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

“Yes. Cyn was right.”

“About what?”

“You know,” she said. “Can she come in now?”

“You know what I do hate,” I said to Cyn, much later that night. “Movies.”

“Movies?” she said, propping herself on one elbow. “You mean some movies, right?”

“Remember what you always said is the answer to every question?”

“Power power power,” Rejji whispered, from the foot of the bed.

“Yeah. You ever see a movie called The Bad Seed ? An old one, from the Fifties, black and white...but they show it all the time on TV, still.”

“I did!” Rej said. “It was the scariest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“I’ve seen it, too,” Cyn said. She reached out one hand, pulled on Rejji’s chain so that the dark-haired girl came closer to her.

“You think it was true?” I asked them both.

“You mean, like, based-on-a-true-story true?” Rejji asked.

“Yeah.”

“I think it probably was,” Cyn said guardedly. “Parts of it, anyway.”

“So you think that little girl, the one who committed all those murders, she was born the way she was?”

“She was, ” Rejji said. “It...skipped a generation, like. Wasn’t it her grandmother who was also—”

“I don’t even remember,” I said. “What I do remember is the whole idea of the movie. Some people are just born evil; it’s in their genes. It doesn’t matter how they’re raised, or who raises them; they are what they are. Destiny. That little girl in the movie, she had great parents. They adored her. Even the neighbor, some woman, she was mad about the kid. They gave her everything.”

“Why does that make you so furious?” Cyn asked, tuned in now.

“Because it’s the dirtiest fucking lie ever told,” I said, remembering the calico cats. “The worst one of all. No kid is born bad. Or born good, either. There’s no genetic code for rapist, or serial killer.”

“But there’s been kids from good homes who—”

“This isn’t about some abuse-excuse rap,” I said. “Some people turn out to be no fucking good no matter how they’re brought up. But they weren’t born to it. There’s nothing about their DNA that makes them that way.”

“Why is that so important?” Cyn asked.

“Because that one miserable fucking movie probably did more to condemn kids than anything the government ever did. You think people on juries get their information from scientific studies? They get their ‘knowledge’ from movies. You just proved it, the both of you.”

“Well, how are we supposed to—?”