Rape (13 page)

D
ELUCCA
S
HOOTING BY
O
FF
-D
UTY
NFPD O
FFICER

D
ROMOOR

R
ULED
S
ELF
-D
EFENSE
A
FTER
I
NVESTIGATION

And in late October:

P
ICK
B
ROTHERS
V
ANISH FROM
F
T
. N
IAGARA
P
ARK

Defendants in Rocky Point Rape Case Missing

P
ICK
B
ROTHERS
“J
UMP
B
AIL
” S
AY
P
OLICE

D
ECLARED
F
UGITIVES

F
ALLS
B
ROTHERS
J
OIN
“M
OST
W
ANTED
” L
IST

After a press conference hurriedly called by Jay Kirkpatrick:

H
IS
C
LIENTS
“H
OUNDED
” O
UT OF
U.S.
BY
P
OLICE

D
EFENSE
L
AWYER
K
IRKPATRICK
C
LAIMS

And:

O
NTARIO
P
ROVINCIAL
P
OLICE
R
EPORT
“N
O
S
IGHTINGS
”

OF
M
ISSING
D
EFENDANTS IN
R
OCKY
P
OINT
R
APE
C
ASE

Nationwide Alert, Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Grandma was always saying, “Hide these damn things from Teena, Bethie. She doesn't need to be reminded.”

Yet Teena must have known. Since DeLucca's death, and since the Pick brothers had vanished, you could see that your mother was less anxious.
She and Dromoor keep in touch. That must be
.

You felt a stab of jealousy, you knew so little about Dromoor.

The Picks had been the ones who'd frightened Teena most. She had believed there was no escape from Marvin Pick in particular. He had been the one to accost her, initially. He had known her, and she had known him, if only slightly. Screaming
Teeeeena!
and grabbing at her and the others roused to frenzy, in his wake.

Even if the Picks had been convicted and sent to prison, one day they would be eligible for parole. They would return to Niagara Falls bent on revenge. Teena had this fixed in her mind, unshakable.

Yet she'd been mistaken, hadn't she? For both Marvin Pick and Lloyd Pick seemed to have vanished. And Teena did not seem to worry that they might be hiding anywhere, and might swoop on her to harm her.

Somehow Teena seemed to know that whether living (in Canada?) or dead (in the choppy waters off Fort Niagara?) neither of the Picks would ever harm her again.

You Lived!

Y
OU LIVED THROUGH IT
. For years you would live through it and only when you graduated from Baltic Senior High and the cobwebby cohesiveness of
peers, classmates
dissolved with no more resistance than actual cobwebs would you escape it.

There wasn't money for a private school. If you'd transferred to Holy Redeemer, where there were boy and girl cousins of yours, things would have been easier.

But you lived through it. That fall, eighth grade at Baltic Junior High. Approaching the school and in the crowded corridors of the school feeling the eyes move upon you. Those classmates who were related to the rapists or who were their neighbors or friends. Those classmates who were sympathetic with the rapists, the guys, because they'd heard nasty things about Martine Maguire, and about you.

What you were doing was
ratting
.
Ratting
to the cops,
ratting
to the DA. Nobody likes a
rat
.

You were fearful to enter a lavatory. Girls inside, older girls the meanest.
Her! There she is, damn liar
. In each of the toilet stalls in the girls' lavatory nearest your homeroom,
there were lipstick scrawls
HATE B.M.—FUCK BETH M
.—from which you learned to avert your eyes quickly.

On the outside of your locker, through most of eighth grade, you would discover ugly words, drawings in spray paint. School custodians could not remove these easily. Sometimes they didn't remove them for days. B.M. SUKS COKS. FUK B.M. There were clumsy cartoon drawings intended to symbolize, you guessed, female sex organs? You tried to lessen the dramatic impact of these by scratching at them with your fingernails until they became meaningless or even benign symbols, like lopsided suns or moons.

The girls who had lockers on either side of yours pretended not to see. Not the graffiti, and not you.

If

I
N HIS EYES YOU
saw it. A tawny yellow gleam as in a video game.

If he hadn't been high on crystal meth. If he hadn't been drunk. If he hadn't been an asshole. Would've been so easy.

Seeing Fritz Haaber, seeing you. On the street. At the mall. Staring at you, face tight as if his skin had shrunk, his teeth and jaws were more prominent, bony bumps in his forehead. Haaber had shaved off his mustache for court appearances. He looked younger, thinner. His hair too had been neatly trimmed. Since Marvin and Lloyd Pick appeared to be out of the trial, the Haabers had borrowed money to hire Kirkpatrick as their lawyer. Except for Fritz Haaber, the remaining defendants had changed their pleas to “guilty” and would negotiate deals with the prosecutors, but Haaber, with his previous assault record, was pleading “not guilty.”

So there would be a trial.

Marvin Pick had scared Teena the most, Fritz Haaber scared you.

At the Niagara Mall with your grandmother, you were coming out of JCPenney and there was Haaber walking with
another guy. Both wearing reversed baseball caps, sheepskin jackets, soiled jeans. Haaber's yellow eyes moving on you, his face tightening with anger.

Haaber was forbidden to approach you. Haaber was forbidden to speak with you. Yet it was unmistakable, the message he sent.

Oh Christ wishing he'd killed you! Slammed your head against the boathouse floor when he'd had his fucking chance. Broken you with his fists, his stomping feet.

And fucked you, too. When he'd had his chance.

If. If only. Would've been so easy, when he'd had his chance
.

So scared, trembling so, Grandma had to drive you home.

You hadn't wanted to tell her about Haaber. She had not seen him, would probably not have known him. There was not much of your life as a thirteen-year-old you told your grandmother about, and even less did you tell your mother.

The stuff at school, all that you spared them. Your worry that Momma would be arrested, charged with contempt of court, if there was a trial and she refused to testify.

Your worry that Momma would die.

You spared the adults in your household. You learned how if a thing is not spoken of, even those closest to you, who love you, will assume that it doesn't exist.

In your marriage, you would cultivate this wisdom.

But you were terrified of Haaber. You seemed to know
He will kill me
. And so you told your grandmother about
him, crying hysterically in the front seat of your grandmother's car. You told your grandmother thinking
She will tell Momma, Momma will call Dromoor
.

Forgiv Me?

N
IGHT OF NOVEMBER
22 three days before the trial was scheduled to begin doused himself with gasoline. Lit a match.

Left behind a note shakily written that would be identified as his handwriting:

God forgiv me and my family I am very ashamed. This will make things right

F. H
.

He'd been drinking heavily. He was desperate, he had the shits and red ants were crawling over his brain night and day. At the same time he was goddamned fucking innocent of doing anything to those females and everybody knew this including the females yet he was convinced the jury would not believe him, his lawyer said if he took the witness stand, which it was crucial that Fritz Haaber do, to present his side of things, like how his semen got inside the Maguire female and how her blood got splattered onto his clothes and caked up in the soles of his jogging shoes, the cunt prosecutor could ask about his “past history of abuse toward women,” so
he was fucked, he was fucked either way, what he'd begun to talk of obsessively was cutting out across the bridge to Canada like those motherfucker Picks, leaving him and the other guys behind, cocksucker traitors, if you want to know the truth it was Marv's idea to gang up on the females, if you want to trace the truth to its source Marv was to blame but Marv was gone, him and Lloyd were gone, and Jimmy DeLucca went nuts and got himself shot down dead like everybody is saying Jimmy must've provoked the cop on purpose, suicide-by-cop it was a known thing, he'd read about in the tabloids and saw on TV. High on crystal meth DeLucca wouldn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, pulling a blade on a guy with a gun. Jesus!

Why hadn't Marv and Lloyd took him with them?! He'd always gotten along with those guys, he thought.

Now it was too late. Customs & Immigration over in Ontario were primed to look for him. All the border crossings between New York and Canada. He'd be arrested and sent back to Niagara Falls in shackles. It was fucking unfair, Marv and Lloyd abandoning their friends to clean up their shit after them.

He ever saw them again he'd murder them. Bastards!

Got to make a good impression on the court Kirkpatrick was saying. All the Haabers and any other relatives around should attend every session. Dressed neatly, and sitting where the jurors can see them. Jurors take note of families. Jurors are not very bright but they have certain expectations. Like they would expect Fritz to testify, seeing that he was claiming innocence. They would wish to study his face. Kirkpatrick
believed that jurors in such a case were inclined to sympathize with the defendant if you provided reasonable evidence for such sympathy. But Fritz's mind drifted when Kirkpatrick talked. Fucker charging such a “fee” you could not comprehend it. Three hundred fifty per hour in court! And a ball-buster “retainer.”The Haabers were fucked, this was costing the grandparents, too. Like a taxi meter ticking, a lawyer-mouth. Once he got this shit behind him if he wasn't sent to Attica Fritz had got to thinking maybe he'd try to be a lawyer himself, these guys really made money for just shooting off their mouths it was mind-fucking. There was nothing actual to it, being a lawyer. He, Fritz, had worked at every kind of shit job from Parks & Recreation he'd started summers in high school to busboy at the Niagara Grand to driving short-haul lumber and gravel deliveries in secret, he wasn't a Teamster and could get his head broke if any union guys caught him. Every kind of degrading shit job you could imagine but all of them real, actual. None of them just words. This legal bullshit the lawyers and judge tossed at one another with straight faces showing this was serious stuff, not bullshit like everybody including them knew.

This other time he'd been arrested, one of the other times, previous “assault and battery” when Donna'd had to go to the ER, she'd testified against him and gotten an injunction and it was in Fritz' favor she'd been his girlfriend not some crazy female not of his acquaintance. The judge had said two years, Fritz had almost shit his pants before the old fart added to be served on probation, Fritz and his mother had both been practically bawling, so grateful. But
this time it was different. Kirkpatrick warned him. Not to expect probation if the jury came in with guilty, the judge would give him the maximum. If the jury came in with guilty.

A jury is as bright as the dumbest member of the jury
Kirkpatrick said.
You need only strike a kindred chord with one of them, and you're home free, son
.

Easy for the fucker to say. Kirkpatrick with his thousand-dollar suits, his fucking Jaguar. Snooty downstate way of talking made everybody else sound like their noses were stuffed. Looking at Fritz and his parents who were good decent Catholics like they were a bad smell in the room Kirkpatrick was too polite to acknowledge.

Now the Picks had jumped bail, everybody else's family was worried as hell they might try it, too. But Fritz had promised he would not no matter how desperate.

Since Fritz had been arrested, dragged into the NFPD van in handcuffs and roughed up at the precinct, he had not been himself. One of the cops had used a choke hold on him. Something had got ripped in his neck. His bowel problems dated to that night. Coming down from the meth high, his brain was fried. Couldn't sleep nights but during the day sometimes in his parents' house hearing Mom's TV. It was comforting, like being a little kid again and you've got a stomachache, earache, your mother lets you stay home from school. That night at the park, Fourth of July, the high school baseball tournament and there were teenage cheerleaders in satin costumes swinging their asses and titties. Frits wasn't sleeping but he would see these girls and groan aloud like one of them was grabbing his cock. Fritz had a thing for
younger girls, his buddies teased him. A female over twenty was a turnoff, they knew too much and made actual wisecracks about the size of your cock. A young girl, really young like Maguire's daughter, is a different case. No wisecracks, she's gonna be scared as hell and respectful.

Fritz had to concede it was just as well probably Bethel Maguire had squirmed out of his grasp like a crazed eel. He'd have fucked the little bitch till she was dead meat. That kind of high, nothing can stop you. Like electricity charging through you. So now he'd be up for murder, he'd be really fucked.