Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [96]
They kept hurting me. I knew someday I’d just split into pieces from what they were doing to me.
I couldn’t wait any longer. One afternoon, I unscrewed the caps on their bottles of wine and carefully poured in the aspirin I had ground into a fine powder. I did the same with their other booze. I couldn’t know which ones they would drink. Or even if what I heard about mixing aspirin and booze would work. But I couldn’t run, and there was no place to hide.
If it didn’t work, I told myself, no matter what happened, it would be over. What they were … doing to me, it would be over. I didn’t care about anything else.
When they fell out that night, the woman was on the couch. The man made it to their bedroom. The son slept in the basement—the same basement he used to make me go down into with him. Whenever he wanted.
I did him first, spraying him with a gentle mist of gasoline. Then I crept upstairs for the man. The woman was last. I think I hated her the worst. I don’t know why—I was already old enough to know that all that stuff about mothers was a lie.
Then I opened the door to the oven and turned on the gas, full-blast. I went around the house, making sure all the windows were shut. The smell was making me sick. I eased open the back door, used the last of my hoarded gasoline to soak a bundle of rags. I dropped a match on the bundle. As soon as it was blazing, I threw it as far inside the house as I could.
And I ran.
I was just a kid, but I’d been schooled. No matter how many times they asked me, I told them the same story. I was out when it happened. Prowling the streets, looking for something to steal. When I finally got back to that wood-frame foster home, it was real late. I was going to sneak in, like I had plenty of times before. That’s when I saw the flames and the fire trucks and all the rest.
One of the cops hit me on top of my head with the flat of his hand. He kept asking me questions, then hitting me every time I answered. It made me so dizzy that I threw up. On him. He picked me up and flung me into the wall, cursing. A couple of other cops pulled him off. They told me to get in the bathroom and clean myself off.
When I came out, there was a woman there. A pretty woman, I thought, with reddish-brown hair and a nice smile. She asked me the same questions as the cops. I gave her the same answers.
They put me in a cell.
In court, all I remember is the judge yelling at one of the men in suits. They used a lot of words I didn’t understand, but I remember hearing “evaluation” a lot.
That’s how I ended up in the crazy house.
I wasn’t afraid of the people who asked the questions. All their questions were stupid. Did I like to play with matches? Did I like to watch fires? One even asked me if I wanted to be a fireman when I grew up.
The big-cheese doctor there, he got mad when I asked him if I could have a cigarette. He thought I was fucking with him. Maybe that’s why he was the boss—he was smarter than the others.
One of them—a social worker, I think, but all I knew was that she was “staff”—asked me if the people in that foster home had … done anything to me. I told them they were mean. I said they hit me and made me work all the time and only gave me the crappiest food. And I told her they were drunk all the time, especially at night. She nodded when I said that, like I’d just confirmed something they already knew.
I knew if I said it had been a nice place they’d know I was lying. But I never told anyone what those people really did. Then they’d know a lot more. Not about those people. About me.
They had all kinds of kids in there. Just like the institution. They were all State kids, too. Or poor ones. If you had people, and if your people had money, they said there were “private facilities” you could go to.
Some of the kids cried all the time. One kid played with himself. Right in front of everyone. His cock was bloody from him constantly pulling at it. Some of them talked to themselves … or to somebody I couldn’t see. Some just stayed wherever staff