Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [12]
“No, no!” he yelled. “Move like her.” He turned to me. “Move.” He kicked at me. I rocked into a ball, froze.
“No, no!” He kicked me. I grunted, didn’t move. He turned to Lucille. “You.” Her teeth were chattering but she held herself still, wrapped up tighter than bacon slices.
“You move!” he shouted. Lucille just hugged her head tighter and started to sob.
“Son of a bitch,” Randall grumbled, “you two will never be any good.”
He walked away. Very slowly we stood up, embarrassed, looked at each other. We knew.
If you fight back, they kill you.
My sister was seven. She was screaming. My stepfather picked her up by her left arm, swung her forward and back. It gave. The arm went around loosely. She just kept screaming. I didn’t know you could break it like that.
I was running up the hall. He was right behind me. “Mama! Mama!” His left hand—he was left-handed—closed around my throat, pushed me against the wall, and then he lifted me that way. I kicked, but I couldn’t reach him. He was yelling, but there was so much noise in my ears I couldn’t hear him.
“Please, Daddy. Please, Daddy. I’ll do anything, I promise. Daddy, anything you want. Please, Daddy.”
I couldn’t have said that. I couldn’t talk around that fist at my throat, couldn’t breathe. I woke up when I hit the floor. I looked up at him.
“If I live long enough, I’ll fucking kill you.”
He picked me up by my throat again.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Why’s she always following you around?”
Nobody really wanted answers.
A full bottle of vodka will kill you when you’re nine and the bottle is a quart. It was a third cousin proved that. We learned what that and other things could do. Every year there was something new.
You’re growing up. My big girl.
There was codeine in the cabinet, paregoric for the baby’s teeth, whiskey, beer, and wine in the house. Jeanne brought home MDA, PCP, acid; Randall, grass, speed, and mescaline. It all worked to dull things down, to pass the time.
Stealing was a way to pass the time. Things we needed, things we didn’t, for the nerve of it, the anger, the need. You’re growing up, we told each other. But sooner or later, we all got caught. Then it was When Are You Going to Learn?
Caught, nightmares happened. “Razorback desperate” was the conclusion of the man down at the county farm where Mark and Luke were sent at fifteen. They both got their heads shaved, their earlobes sliced.
What’s the matter, kid? Can’t you take it?
Caught at sixteen, June was sent to Jessup County Girls’ Home, where the baby was adopted out and she slashed her wrists on the bedsprings.
Lou got caught at seventeen and held in the station downtown, raped on the floor of the holding tank.
Are you a boy or are you a girl?
On your knees, kid, can you take it?
Caught at eighteen and sent to prison, Jack came back seven years later blank-faced, understanding nothing. He married a quiet girl from out of town, had three babies in four years. Then Jack came home one night from the textile mill, carrying one of those big handles off the high-speed spindle machine. He used it to beat them all to death and went back to work in the morning.
Cousin Melvina married at fourteen, had three kids in two and a half years, and welfare took them all away. She ran off with a carnival mechanic, had three more babies before he left her for a motorcycle acrobat. Welfare took those, too. But the next baby was hydrocephalic, a little waterhead they left with her, and the three that followed, even the one she used to hate so—the one she had after she fell off the porch and couldn’t remember whose child it was.
“How many children do you have?” I asked her.
“You mean the ones I have, or the ones I had? Four,” she told me, “or eleven.”
My aunt, the one I was named for, tried to take off for Oklahoma. That was after she’d lost the youngest girl and they told her Bo would never be “right.” She packed up biscuits, cold chicken, and Coca-Cola; a lot of loose clothes; Cora and her new