Authors: Roberta Latow
It had not taken more than an hour at that table for Manoussos to realise that Chadwick, for all her intelligence, beauty and incredible sensuality, was indeed naive, an innocent when it came to the harshness and the joys of real life. She had been a woman who had been cushioned and cared for. She had lived and loved and emotionally died in many and strange ways but always in a cocoon. It was at the table that he realised this odyssey she was on was probably the first time in her life she had struck out on her own. He loved her the more for it, too much to make her feel insecure by telling her he did believe she was naive about people and life. What he said was, ‘Everybody at that table today takes
each other at face value. No one really cares what their friends are or are not. In Livakia things are what they are, people will be what they will be. When that ceases to be then Livakia will lose its magic. This is a very egocentric place.’
Chadwick listened to his words, she more than listened, she really heard what Manoussos was saying and believed him. If only she had found out sooner that people could and did live like that; that hypocritical morality and guilt was no way to live.
She ran a few steps in front of Manoussos and turned to face him. She walking backwards, they advanced down the lane, their footsteps the only sound in the quiet of the early evening. She asked him, ‘How much further to your house? I listened to Mark and was enthralled by his oratory and boyish good looks, flattered by his attention, but I wanted sex with you.’ She opened her jacket and slowly, seductively, removed it and tossed it to Manoussos.
A crescent moon appeared overhead and shone white beams down the narrow lane. It lit Chadwick’s face and reflected off the white-washed walls surrounding the houses and enclosing the cobblestone path. They continued walking and Chadwick told him, ‘Elefherakis was charming. His manners, intelligence, the erotic aura around him, the way he looked at me as if he wanted to devour me in his lust … but I could only think of the thrill of those hours of sex with you.’
Somewhere in the distance they heard a dog bark. The darkness of night descended further and suddenly the sky was peppered with millions of stars. Chadwick unwound the white silk scarf from around her neck and tossed that too to Manoussos who was mesmerised by her beauty in the moonlight, her seductive strip tease. She continued, ‘I watched Rachel flirt and cock tease the crew, and became hot with lust to think that she would have them all, one at a time or altogether, but it was you I wanted to come with, not them.’
They were nearly at the end of the lane when Manoussos stopped before an ancient wooden door studded with antique bronze nails. Chadwick continued to walk backwards for several steps and then stopped. They were gazing at each other across the
distance separating them. They had arrived at his house. Her heart filled with joy. She stripped off her jumper and now, naked to the waist, walked forward very slowly, continuing to speak. ‘All through lunch, I saw Jane Plum watching us. I knew that you had had her by the look of envy in her eyes, and it didn’t matter to me because you would never have her again. You will only love me in the way she wanted you to love her.’
Up close to him now, she unbuttoned her jeans. Anxious with desire, she pulled them open. He slipped his hand inside them and caressed her mound and her belly, her hips and her bottom, working his caresses up to her breasts. He was rough when he pulled her tight up against him and, lowering his head, sucked on her erect nipples. She sighed, whimpered from the sheer sense of ecstasy overwhelming her as she came in a short and intense orgasm.
He opened the gate and swept her into his arms, carrying her through the courtyard and up several steps. His hands too busy, she managed the front-door latch and he kicked the door open. Up several more steps and into the sitting room where the moonlight was streaming through the windows. Not once since he had walked her through the courtyard had she stopped seducing him with lewd, base, hardcore sex-talk. Low, raunchy come-ons. No whore could have done better to excite lust, trigger depraved desires, and coming from a lady, a beautiful goddess of a woman whom he loved, it was even more thrilling, more wild.
This was inspired sexual seduction on Chadwick’s part, played out to make them forget their egos and souls, love and the responsibility of relationships. Here was a woman who wanted to whip them both into anything goes sex. And she knew very well how to do it, Chadwick was a master at it. They were out of their clothes and over the edge sexually. Manoussos threw her face down on a carpet in front of the fireplace. The moonlight playing on her body only added to the mystery of Chadwick’s sexual lust – oh, yes, there was definitely a mysterious and secretive quality about her sexuality. Manoussos used her white silk scarf to tie her wrists to the legs of a chair and held her down with one arm as he lit a match and tossed it into the fire laid in the hearth. It flared up
at once and he turned his attention to Chadwick who was trying to turn herself over.
‘No,’ he told her firmly. She obeyed him and lay there quite still. He found a cushion and brought it back to her so she could rest her face upon it, stroked her hair and kissed the back of her neck, bit into it until she squirmed with pain. There were no caresses; no affection or foreplay would take place. One long and admiring look at her stunningly sexy body – the whiteness of the skin, the firmness and shapeliness of her flesh – was all he could manage. The heat of her desire to be possessed by him, her openness and vulnerability, he could refuse her nothing of what she wanted she had manipulated him into her kind of lust, the sex she wanted. Now it was what he wanted, what he now demanded she accept.
He took his belt and used it across her bottom, not to give her pain but to awaken her lust further. Just a few strokes and she was trembling with anticipation of what was to come. He threw the belt across the room and laid his body over hers, rubbed himself up and down her several times, to feel her skin against his. He was madly, deeply, lustful for Chadwick. He raised her to her knees by her waist from behind and without ceremony, in one fell swoop, thrust as hard and as deep as was possible. She called out in a scream of passion and delight. He found his pace which was for her breathlessly quick and thrilling. At her instigation he took her wherever possible from behind and they had sex unfettered by fear and morality, became like animals in rut. They wallowed in their lust and depravity and both came several times until they collapsed in a heap of exhausted bliss.
Chadwick triggered a lust in them both that simply could not be sated. They bathed together and in the shower, after he came to her delivery of exquisite oral sex, she made more demands that rendered him passive, on the receiving ends of her thrusts, under her control. Only lying in her arms and watching a dozing Chadwick did Manoussos come to understand that Chadwick Chase was the most dangerous thing that had ever entered his life and that for the time being he could do nothing about it, he had already thrown caution to the four winds. She had entrapped him
in lust and love. He was enslaved as he ruthlessly enslaved so many women to him, for sex, a momentary love. He prayed this was not to be a case of poetic justice.
It was oppressively warm and humid and there was a thick mauvy-pearl mist hovering in the trees. Chadwick could occasionally hear the rustle of some small animal in the underbrush, a larger one among the flowering plants: azalea, mountain laurel in an array of colours, rhododendron as large as small trees, and her favourite, dogwood, growing wild in the forest. From an unseen sun, streaks of brighter mist shone down at steep angles between the trunks of trees: ash, beech, elm, chestnut, the tulip poplar, pine, spruce.
Chadwick knew these woods as no one else. This was where she really lived. Here was where she played out her dreams, when she wasn’t sitting in a tree willing her prince to come and take her away from the ugliness of her life, the lovelessness, poverty and hatred, the unbearable mental and physical cruelty she lived with every day, week after week, year in and year out.
Chadwick was drenched in perspiration. She raised the hem of her thin cotton dress and used its skirt to wipe her face neck and arms. There was black bear in the woods – her father was the best bear hunter in the county – white-tailed deer – he excelled at that too – opossum, fox, but it was a rabbit that shot across her path now. She ran after it for several hundred yards but it vanished into the bushes. This was not running weather. She collapsed in a heap on the ground, laughing.
She didn’t laugh much in the house or when she was anywhere near her family. Ed Chadwick, her father, was a killer who took enormous delight in killing whether it was animal, man, or laughter. Her father was a sadistic brute, an autocrat who ruled
over and abused his children, a man people the entire county over, including the law, feared.
He ran two stills buried deep in the woods where he manufactured 100-proof alcohol. It was illegal but the law could never find them. He had shot several intruders on his land and a uniform would hardly deter Ed Chadwick, so they let him be. He feared only two people. One was the itinerant doctor who’d taken a gun to Ed’s head and told him he would shoot him dead if Ed did not allow Chadwick to go to school, or if he ever found out that he was using her as he had used his other daughters and his sons. Chadwick, his incredibly beautiful, sensuous and courageous twelve-year-old daughter, was the other person. She was the only member of the family who stood up to him. She did, however, have to take her beatings for it.
Ed believed there was something of the same cold killer instinct in his youngest daughter as in him. It was something in her eyes, a certain look. He recognised that she would indeed kill him, which she had promised to do, if he ever forced an incestuous relationship on her. Nevertheless Chadwick was under constant threat from her father because he wanted her something fierce. So did most of the men who came to shoot with him. She was the prize beauty of the county, and had something more, something inscrutable, that drew the men to her.
The Chadwicks owned a small farm that just about kept the family self-sufficient, and some years didn’t even do that. This was Tennessee’s easternmost region, part of the Blue Ridge Mountain system. Most of the area was heavily forested and the soil thin and stony, yielding poor crops. The booze, and the hunting and fishing parties Ed Chadwick arranged, didn’t make the family rich, merely kept them just above the poverty line. He used his wife and his children as slaves and married the girls off at the age of thirteen to other backwoods men like himself for money, and then only when he was through using them for his own sexual satisfaction.
Ed Chadwick was a mean, illiterate animal who believed that
his farm and his land were his kingdom, places where he could do anything he wanted to do. He considered his wife and children to be his chattels, no more and no less than that. He not only believed he was above the law but lived that way so long as he was on his own land – one reason why he rarely left it and certainly never the county. Any trespassers were fair game to shoot, rob, or be disposed of as he saw fit.
Chadwick had turned the dense forest into a series of hideaways. They were her escape hatches from her prison of misery into the free world. On this particular day she was on her way up one of the lesser mountains they called Little Chickamauga where she had built a small lean-to to house her collection of American Indian relics, bits and pieces of artefacts she found on Little Chickamauga and in its surrounding forests.
The family had always called it Little Chickamauga because during the American Civil War a much smaller but equally fierce battle to the one that took place on the Chickamauga battlefield had raged there. Five Chadwicks had fought and died there for the south.
Before Tennessee was settled several Indian tribes hunted and claimed portions of the area. After the Europeans arrived, the Shawnee, the Chickasaw and the Creek moved west, as did the Cherokee who claimed the central and eastern part, these very mountains and forests where the Chadwicks had settled more than a hundred years before and where they had remained. The first Chadwicks settled in with the Cherokee and even now there was a trace of Native American blood running through the veins of Ed Chadwick and his children though for generations the Chadwicks denied that while simply ignoring their inbreeding. Ed was proud of being considered white trash, backwoods, and feared.
Chadwick knew nothing of who and what she was and didn’t much care. All she did know was that her school mates, whose backgrounds were not much different from her own and their poverty in some cases even worse, ignored and distrusted her. The rare times her father would collect her from school in his dilapidated, rusted, open Ford truck, they ran away in fear.
Because of Ed, Chadwick’s schooling was sporadic; because of him, her forays into the woods were not.
She did not have rich pickings for her collection but she did have a knack for finding odd Indian fragments. Throughout her childhood the few artefacts she did find were her only toys, her treasured possessions. They seemed to appear for her as if by magic, and sure enough today she spotted an arrow head, a very nearly perfect specimen. She dropped to her knees to search further in the undergrowth but was distracted. She thought she heard something farther up the mountain, then silence. She stood up and listened. Again, nothing. She strained her eyes, but visibility above six feet and more than twenty feet in front of her was obscured. By now she would have expected the sun to have burned off the heavy mist, but it hadn’t, not a bit. She knew her forest well, if the heat, humidity and heavy mist had not broken by now they were in for several more days of this steamy weather. There seemed no point in going on because half the fun of being in the lean-to was that it had a spectacular view for miles around.
Chadwick turned to start for home but not before she buried her arrow head and marked the place with a broken branch of dogwood. She had only taken a few steps when she heard that same sound again. The cry of an eagle? No, it was more human than that. And again she heard it. She remained very still though she knew that whatever it was it was a good distance away; she knew how sound travelled through the forest. She waited for very nearly five minutes and heard nothing more. She waited a few minutes after that and then decided to make the climb to investigate.
She barely saw the wreckage of the plane until she was practically on top of it, that was how much more dense the mist was an hour’s climb from where she had found her arrow head. The six-seater plane was cream-coloured and seemed to loom out of the mist like a ghost. It was up-ended, the wings and wreckage strewn around somewhere, the body broken in half, tail sticking nearly straight up in the air. The door was gone, the windows smashed out, two leather-covered seats on the ground. Two men had been flung from the plane, another was still sitting in the
cockpit. He wasn’t moving. The trees where the plane had swathed a path through them were sheared of their foliage and branches; once giants, they seemed to be lying around as if they were no more than toothpicks. Chadwick was for the moment traumatised by the sight. She merely stood there, taking it all in. One of the men lying on the ground opened his eyes. ‘Good god, we’re saved. It’s a child.’
Chadwick, who’d thought they were all dead, was pulled out of her shock but frightened for a moment, thinking they were ghosts. She turned on her worn, ragged and laceless sneakers and started running away as fast as she could. ‘Don’t be frightened, for God’s sake don’t run away! We need your help. None of us is dead but we soon will be if you abandon us. We’ve been here more than two days.’
Chadwick stopped running and turned around. She did not move. It took some coaxing from the man in the cockpit who had raised his head off his chest and was now peering through what had once been a side window. ‘My name is Hannibal Chase and I’m pinned in here. It’s hard for me to breathe, even to talk. You see, I think I have broken ribs. That man with the broken leg is called Sam and the other man is Andrew. He’s lost a great deal of blood from the gash in his leg, that’s why he has a tourniquet tied on his thigh and can’t move. We’re very dehydrated, we need water and food and medical help and strong men to get us out of here. Can you understand that? Can you help us?’
Andrew, the one propped against the trunk of a tree and the oldest of the men, tried to stand up. He suddenly keeled sideways. Chadwick ran towards him to help. She managed to brace him against the tree. He called out in pain and quickly apologised. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
‘You’re all sure in a mess. I’m not frightened. Best you don’t play brave and sit back down.’ She went to the man with the broken leg and examined it thoughtfully. ‘Well, Mr Sam, as I see it that’s a pretty darn good splint. You do that, Mr Andrew?’
‘Yes,’ he told Chadwick.
She returned to Andrew Coggs and placed her small slender
hand on his forehead. ‘Mighty hot, and lordy, you’re looking real white, sorta greenish-white and sickly.’ She examined his wounded thigh, where his trouser leg had been torn away and the leg had been wrapped in cotton wadding and tied tight to staunch the blood. His shirt had been made into a bandage and wound into a rope through which a broken twig had been shoved which he kept twisted tightly. The open first aid kit lay on the ground. She looked briefly through it. ‘Lucky you had this here Red Cross kit. I’d say all things considered, you men’re not doing too badly. Except maybe this is the worse weather for an open wound.’
‘You seem to know a lot,’ said Andrew who had for the last twenty-four hours himself been worrying about gangrene.
‘Have to, don’t I? Doctors don’t come easy round here. Now I’m coming up to assess the situation you’re in, Mr Chase.’
The three looked at one another. Sam even managed a smile. All were in wonder over this strangely beautiful waif in her pathetically thin and worn printed cotton dress who seemed not only to have found them, but was calmly and collectedly taking them over. They watched in wonder as she climbed into the plane and struggled through the wreckage to the cockpit and Hannibal Chase.
She tossed out bits and pieces of debris to make room for herself and then leaned against part of the fuselage, the part that had not pinned him to his seat. They looked intently at one another in silence for several minutes. Hannibal was quite stunned by her beauty, a certain aura. He had never seen a lovelier looking child. She seemed to him like the mysterious child-woman that every great artist past and present wants to paint. He smiled and asked, ‘What’s your name, child?
‘Chadwick.’
‘Is that your first or your last name?’
She smiled at Hannibal Chase and, leaning forward, raised the printed scarf he had covered his head wound with and took a peek. He flinched. She then touched an open wound encrusted with coagulated blood on his cheek, another on his chin. He
flinched again. He could move his arms and hands and raised one hand to remove hers gently from his face.
She gave him a smile and answered him. ‘That’s my only name. My pa says I can have the family name but no more. Don’t deserve no more ’cause I think I’m somethin’ and I act too clever by half, as if I’m better than him and my kin. So everybody calls me Nothing, ’cause that’s what my pa says I am, or Hey, You, or Chadwick or Chad.’
‘I’ll call you Chadwick.’
‘That’ll do.’
‘It would be nice to get out of here before dark, Chadwick. Do you think you can get your father to get help for us?’
‘Have to, won’t I?’
The look of relief on Hannibal Chase’s face gave Chadwick a chance to assess this stranger who had crashed into her world. She had never met a strange man before. All the men she ever met were relatives or neighbours who hunted with her father. Men with gruff voices and filthy manners who leered lustily and behaved like animals, cruel, mean and hard in their ruthlessness. Except for Dr Rudge.
Hannibal Chase was to the twelve-year-old child a beautiful man, the closest thing to the male glamour she had seen on the roadside billboards advertising Ronson razors, Marlboro cigarettes, and Chevrolet trucks. He had a grand voice. She liked his accent. It was Yankee but there was kindness in it, the same way as behind the pain and worry in his eyes there was something soft there, for her.
‘Do you think you will be able to find us again?’ asked Hannibal.
Chadwick laughed. ‘I found you once, didn’t I? Don’t you fret. I can tell you one thing, Hannibal Chase, I know these mountains and backwoods well enough that I sure as hell itself woulda missed hitting Little Chickamauga like you done, even in this soupy mist. Two hours down, two hours back, at a good run, and two hours, maybe more, for me to find my Pa and him to round up some men. You won’t see me before then.’
‘The doctor, you won’t forget the doctor?’
‘Can’t figure on a doctor comin’ up here. Maybe at home. If we can get you home.’
‘Water …’
‘I was coming to that, Mr Chase. There’s a good mountain stream half-hour from here. ’Fore I go down to fetch Pa, I’ll go down to the stream.’
Amidst the debris Chadwick found canisters once filled with crisps and biscuits, peanuts, coffee, tea, and a piece of canvas luggage. She scraped up every last morsel of the scattered bar food and gave a handful to each of the men, loaded the torn but still usable canvas suitcase with the empty canisters, and with some clever innovations with Brooks Brothers shirts, turned it into a knapsack. Wasting little time she assured them, ‘I’ll be back as fast as I can with the best mountain stream water you ever did drink.’