-- DAN
CHAPTER 18
Brenda Jorden was born in Shinehull, Georgia, a barely incorporated little collection of truck stops, diners, brothels, and a few other meager businesses just north of the Florida border. Her mother, a prostitute, was knifed to death in the sleeper compartment of a tractor-trailer when Brenda was two, and Brenda went to stay with her grandparents, who also lived in Shinehull.
Her grandmother, Leigh, was a petite brunette with pale skin and green eyes who waited tables in one of the diners. Leigh’s husband, Arthur, was a gigantic black man with arms as big around as most men’s thighs. Arthur worked as a mechanic.
On summer nights Arthur read Brenda stories before she went to sleep, with a voice so deep it nearly shook the bed frame, and on each of those nights he promised her that he’d always protect her. As a girl she believed him. Then, three weeks before she entered junior high school, Arthur died of a heart attack. That night, Leigh took Arthur’s .38 and put a bullet through the roof of her own mouth and into her brain.
Due to a clerical mixup, the county Department of Family and Children’s Services at first placed Brenda in a home for troubled youths, where a mildly retarded boy named Eddie violently raped her behind the school’s equipment shed.
Brenda spent sixteen days in a hospital, after which she was released into the custody of the first in a string of foster families. At the fourth foster home, a bowling pal of the father’s got drunk one night, came to the house when the parents were gone to a movie, and he too raped Brenda. Full of guilt and shame over his crime, he stabbed her with a hunting knife and threw her in the deepest part of a nearby stream. A deputy sheriff named Jay Clives pulled her out of the stream thirty-two hours later and took her to another hospital, where she stayed longer this time.
That fall Brenda entered high school. Her class was predominantly white, and when a couple of the students learned her grandfather was black, they began a campaign of harassment that lasted two straight years. Brenda found the words “nigger” and “coon” and “spade” spray-painted on her locker, on the ragged-out Lincoln Continental Arthur had left her, and eventually on the walls of her current foster home. Her tires were slashed. Students tripped her and shoved her in the halls. She tried to approach the tiny group of black students at the school, but they took in her green eyes and milk-pale skin and refused to speak to her.
Brenda dropped out after her sophomore year and took a job at a day-care center near the diner where Leigh had worked. She seemed to have a knack for connecting with children, and for a while thought she’d found her place.
A few weeks after her first night on the job, a man named Rafael approached her as she was walking to her car and offered her a chance to make several hundred dollars a night, without ever having to leave her room. When she refused the offer, he became violent, pulled a switchblade, and seemed poised to use it when Jay Clives, the deputy who’d found Brenda in the stream, shot Rafael in the hand at point blank range. He’d been driving past and seen what was happening. Deputy Clives gave Brenda a ride home that night, since she was too shaky to drive.
Eight weeks later Brenda became Mrs. Jay Clives, and moved in with him to his double-wide trailer.
For a little more than a year Brenda was genuinely happy, the first time she’d been so since the day her grandparents both left her. With her income from the day-care center plus Jay’s salary at the police department, they were able to start a decent savings account, and talked about the possibility of having children. Brenda bought a book on crocheting, and tried to make a baby blanket.
But on a damp night in July, Jay Clives came home drunk, after losing his job as sheriff’s deputy, and demanded that Brenda have sex with him. He was loud and frightening, and when she pulled away from him he clubbed her on the side of the head, bent her over the back of a kitchen chair and took her forcibly.
They were just far enough away from the neighbors so that none of them heard Brenda’s screams.
Jay Clives adopted a different attitude toward his young wife after that night. He spent his days on the couch in their trailer, rarely without a bottle in his hand, and demanded sex both before Brenda left for work and when she got home. If she did anything to displease him, he shouted and called her “little nigger bitch.” At one point, angered because his eggs had gotten cold, he hit her with an electric skillet and broke her arm.
The Clives family stayed that way, with Brenda at the day-care center and Jay mostly on the couch, for two years and seven months.
Then one night the sky opened up and touched her.
It happened just past eleven, as the news was coming on, after Brenda had finished satisfying Jay for the fourth time that day. Raw and sore, as she seemed to be all the time, she put on a bathrobe and went outside to sit on the trailer’s back steps. She liked to sit out there if the weather was nice, look up at the stars and pretend she could still hear Arthur’s voice. Crickets chirped in the long grass around her, and a warm, gentle wind blew in from the west.
One star seemed to be particularly bright, and as she watched, it quivered and flashed like a small sun.
Something like a grenade went off in Brenda’s head.
When she came to herself, she was lying in the grass next to the steps, and her nostrils were filled with a pungent aroma, something she couldn’t quite place but which seemed terribly familiar. As she attempted to get back to her feet, the scent still filling the air around her, the back door slammed open and Jay planted one thick foot on the top step.
“‘M hungry,” he slurred, nearly blind drunk. “Gitcher ass in here ’n cook me sumpthin’.”
Brenda locked her eyes on Jay’s as she slowly stood and climbed the steps toward him. He didn’t move yet. She figured he’d grab her ass or one of her breasts as she passed and hoot or make a vulgar comment. The scent filled her head, saturated her brain, and she felt as though her feet barely made contact with the rough wood as she climbed.
Brenda reached out, and smiled, and touched him.
The scent drained away out of the air, into him, and Jay’s eyes filmed over.
His jaw went slack, and he dropped the bottle of Milwaukee’s Best he’d been holding. It hit the floor without breaking, splashed beer on the cracked linoleum, and rolled out the door and into the grass.
Brenda said, “Get out of my way, asshole.”
Jay did as he was told. He backed up, turned, and cleared the doorway for her. Brenda couldn’t believe it—but neither did she question it. She couldn’t smell the strong scent anymore, but she still felt it in her brain, deep inside her, and it felt right. Everything felt right. She took her time going through the knife drawer and finally came out with one she’d won as a door prize at a county fair. It had a thick black plastic handle and a long, serrated blade. She thumbed the edge, flipped it over and held it out, handle-first, to Jay.
“Here. Take this.”
He did. Holding the knife, his hand fell back to his side, limp. Buzzing. Buzzing in her brain, like a million wasps, whisper compounding on whisper till it became a roar. Somewhere in her mind she thought, what’s happening, why is this happening, what am I doing? But that wasn’t the part of her mind in control just then. Calmly, evenly, she said, “Jay, I think you should take off the fingers on your left hand now.”
Jay tottered, uncertain. Brenda said, “You can use the kitchen table, that’s all right.”
Jay loved that table. It was nothing more than particle board with an “oak veneer,” but it was a gift from his mother, and Jay said it fit him perfectly. Brenda hated it.
Slowly, deliberately, Jay moved over to the table. He set his left hand on its surface, and used the knife to chop off his fingers, one by one. Brenda giggled. “Good job, honey. That was real good.”
Jay held up the bloody stump of his hand, and tears began to roll down his cheeks. He made a small, high sound in the back of his throat.
Brenda said, “Now, honey! You’ll do whatever I tell you, won’t you?”
Jay nodded.
“And you like using that knife, don’t you?”
Jay’s neck muscles strained. His keening grew louder. He nodded again. “Good. Real good. Now, Jay, drop your pants for me, will you?”
Seven hours later Brenda walked away from the raging torch that used to be her home, the shadows of her and her suitcase thrown long and wavery on the driveway.
Things happened quickly after that. She didn’t go to jail. Instead, a man in a dark suit spoke to the sheriff and the Georgia Bureau of Investigations officer assigned to the case. Brenda was promptly released into the man’s custody, and he asked her to accompany him to Savannah where, he said, a few new options might be opened to her.
The man walked with a cane, and said his name was Stamford.
AUTHOR’S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION
Posts
2 comments:
I don't actually have much to say about this section.
That's partially because I've got three freelance deadlines all bearing down on me at once, at the same time that we're getting ready to celebrate my wife's birthday, and my brainspace is extremely limited.
It's partially because, even though I'm back at Hapkido and loving it, my neck is very stiff and painful after tonight's class.
It's also partially because I just sort of like this bit. I'm kind of proud of it.
Maybe I'll have something more worthwhile to say after the weekend.
Really, I can't help but sympathize with Brenda, even if she does go a little overboard. That's a LOT of frustration to carry around, and when the relief valve blows, well ..... Yeah, he had it coming.
Post a Comment