Beyond Recognition

10

The brunette with the thin waist and the tight skirt was in the kitchen cleaning up from the popcorn, and Ben knew that she had to come through the living room to reach Jack, who was already waiting in the bedroom. She was a new one, brown hair pulled back with a hair band, less makeup than the others, thinner than most of the women he dragged back with him. Ben liked her. She had rented the video with him in mind. The movie was a little sappy, but Ben enjoyed what passed as a normal evening at home. Typically, the only normal things in his life were school and-after school-Emily.

He wondered what better way to welcome her than to share his cherished death pose with her. He didn’t let just anybody see it.

He positioned himself in the guy’s favorite chair, one of the ones with a handle that leaned way back and lifted your knees, and he hung his head over the arm, so that he stretched his neck and the blood ran into his face, turning it a bright red. Then he popped out his glass eye, carefully cupped it in his hand, and opened both his eyes in a deadman’s stare that he fixed on the bookshelf across the room.

A minute later he heard the water stop and her footsteps approaching, and he spread his arms out so they were floppy, and he held in his breath so that his chest stopped moving.

Her scream was loud enough that a neighbor called the police, and to make matters worse she peed in her pants, making a big dark stain in the crotch of her jeans. Jack had hold of Ben before Ben could settle her down, and all at once there was that unmistakable sound of his belt singing out of the loops, and Ben felt his world invert and then the belt started connecting with his butt and he thought maybe he’d be sick to his stomach. The girl, Jane? June? April? — Ben suddenly couldn’t remember-screamed even louder for the guy to stop, but that belt kept coming like a whip, and when the girl ran from the house the guy turned the belt around so that the buckle became part of the punishment. Somewhere in the ensuing nightmare, Ben threw up on the fancy chair, which only brought the belt down harder.

When he had satisfied himself, Jack dropped Ben into the chair like a sack of potatoes, pushed his face into the vomit, and told him to clean up the mess or “face worse.” Ben was solid tears, but he hadn’t let out a peep-that was one of the rules.

Maybe the cops saved his life-he thought later-because the knock on the door, followed by the strong voices announcing themselves, forced Jack to send Ben to his room rather than let Ben be seen. He pulled the boy by the hair to where his sweating face nearly touched Ben’s tearstained cheeks, and he spoke in a dry, forced whisper. “Out of here. And not a sound!”

Ben could barely move, his butt was so raw, but he flew up those stairs nonetheless. He heard one of the cops say something about a complaint from a neighbor; the cops wanted a look around. “We gotta check something like this out,” the unfamiliar voice explained.

Ben understood his situation clear as day. One, in his condition he couldn’t let himself be discovered by the cops; Jack could get in big trouble, which would only mean more beatings. Two, the guy was sure to kill him once the cops were gone.

He opened his window and went out the familiar route, along the roof-quietly! — over to the tree off the kitchen, and down through the limbs. His butt was a source of blinding, nauseating pain. With a deep inhale of the cool night air, he felt free-the most amazing, most welcome feeling of all.

For the walk to Emily’s, Ben, slow on his feet and unable to run even if he had wanted to, stayed off Martin Luther King, sticking to back streets. He did not think of Seattle as a dangerous place, and he was not afraid of the dark, but his temporary disability from the whipping, and his blind eye, left him with an acute sense of vulnerability and uneasiness.

The air smelled faintly of the sea and strongly of bus fumes. The sky glowed vividly from the brightness of downtown. The constant hum of engines and the whine of tire rubber played out like a chorus of summer insects. A ferry horn bellowed. The city. The Seattle he would have known even blindfolded.

Emily’s house was dark, the neon window sign switched off, and he was loath to roust her, loath to admit on any level that his existence with the guy was untenable, that the time to offer evidence against the guy had long since passed. That the time had come. His fear was not of pain or reprimand but of being alone. Not of loneliness but aloneness. He felt sorry for himself. She had told him that for a time he would be in the care of the state, and nothing scared him more. She had told him she would rescue him from their care and provide for him and nourish him and love him, and though he trusted her intentions he remained skeptical of the process. Of the system. He feared desertion. His mother had run away without a word.

Briefly, the truth clanged inside his chest, as it did on occasion: His mother would never have left him behind.

He climbed the cedar tree, past the sitting limb, and up to the platform-six boards nailed between two old boughs, each capable of supporting a car. He had a more complete tree fort behind his own house, but this platform at Emily’s was a safer refuge given the trouble he’d caused. He lay down on the platform keenly aware of his wounds and curled himself into a ball, where he hugged himself until he fell fast asleep, pulled down into the drowsiness of a body and mind in need of repair. Of escape. Sucked down into a dream that turned nightmare: his own inescapable existence.