Stolen Life (42 page)

Three people sit on the couch set along the living-room wall: Shirley Anne at the end farthest into the room, Ernie in the middle, and Dwa beside a small end table. Out of sight under the couch lies a nonfunctioning
rifle. Yvonne sits in the sofa chair with her back to the doorway into the kitchen; the end table and Dwa are on her left, a wider coffee table and lamp on her right. Beyond that, on her right, is the door to the children’s bedroom. It is closed.

All four are drinking; the three on the couch discuss, interrupt, argue what to do when the men arrive. They are coming, that’s that.

Charles Skwarok arrives. He is alone, not with his cousins as Shirley Anne had said he’d be. He carries a carton half full of beer and a heavy plastic bag. He does not sit in the other sofa chair in the living room: he puts his stuff down and goes into the kitchen and returns with a stacking chair whose thin metal legs are curved round at the back. He sits down directly opposite the three people on the sofa, a metre and a half away; Yvonne is within arm’s reach across the coffee table on his left, and the door of the children’s bedroom is immediately behind him. He opens a beer and digs into his bag and pulls out some magazines. He says Shirley Anne asked for them, to “spice things up.”

Yvonne refuses to so much as look at them; she is thinking:
Don’t look at this dirt he drags into my house, be stiff, be cold and he’ll leave, don’t move, don’t say a word
.

Shirley Anne leans forward to stare at the magazine spread out in Ernie’s lap, and she reaches under the couch. She asks Ernie: “Are there any pictures of small kids in there?”

Ernie stares up at Chuck directly: “Do you like men, or little boys? Their tight buns?”

Voices are rising, Shirley Anne is asking questions now, too fast to wait for answers. Chuck tilts back on the rounded legs of his chair with his gut stretching his T-shirt above his pants, a bit puzzled at first but seemingly not at all concerned. Finally he says to the two men, “Sure … sure, some men have nice buns. I was gonna go fishing with a couple today, but they left, so.…”

He shrugs, relaxed, the biggest guy there with a slit of stomach exposed, and suddenly Dwa, on the couch in his summer-white shorts, hunches around and crosses his bare legs.

“Stop staring at my balls,” he says to Chuck.

There is a shift of feeling in the room, like a sliver of winter wind. Ernie and Chuck are talking very loudly now, not listening to each other. Shirley Anne is scrabbling her arm under the couch and mouthing at Yvonne, “Ask him now, ask him now,” so eager to prove herself right.

“No!” Yvonne exclaims, thumping her empty bottle on the coffee table and jerking to her feet. Chuck reaches his long arm down and pulls up a beer from his carton and offers it to her and she says “No!” again. The room is so crowded, she is standing directly against his legs and she won’t look at him. “I don’t want anything from you!” She is hemmed in; how can she get past him and the coffee table into the open space of the kitchen? “I get my own beer in my own house!”

But she is trapped by his body and the loathing of who he may be, and directly behind her Shirley Anne shouts, “Tell them what you told me, your wife hauled you into court, you were molesting your own girl, tell ’em, you fucken kiddy fucker!”

Chuck tilts upright on his chair, his body moving forward against Yvonne, suddenly huge, his face almost in her chest.

“Move, please!” she says, loudly but terrified. He is peering at her, his body thrusting forward onto her, yelling something at the others. She never has anyone to protect her—“Move!”—she lashes at him with both her fists.

He tips backwards on the rounded legs of his chair, crashes against the bedroom door. It bursts open, and he falls back flat.

Now Charles Skwarok is halfway inside her children’s bedroom. Yvonne hears one of their voices, waking up, and breaks into total panic. She grabs across him for the door knob. “Get out of there, get out!” jerking, jerking, but his head and shoulders block the doorway. She bangs the thin door against him till he twists, curls himself around, and she can finally slam it shut. He kicks some space for his feet, uncoils himself upwards in front of her, his fist comes up and he
smashes her; she explodes backwards, head over heels, across the coffee table, knocking the lamp onto the floor beyond and crashing down with it.

Yvonne is crouched on the floor between the coffee table and sofa chair; she knows by instinct what she must do. She must remain small, tiny; she cannot permit herself to be beaten senseless, her children are in the next room; she must remain conscious and extremely small, her bare feet flat on the floor, her thighs resting on the backs of her lower legs, her upper body and head bowed low, and her hands quietly cleaning the shards of the light bulb aside so she will not cut herself when she has to leap up.

There is shouting, shrieking above her, Chuck bellowing, “You fight like a man, you take it like a man!” and “I never did nothing, you cunts,” and Shirley Anne, “You told me what you did, you kid fucker,” and Ernie, “Fucken skinner,” and Dwa sitting there completely quiet, in six years Yvonne has never heard him yell.
Stay small, fake it till you have to make it
.

Chuck swings from side to side, poised to handle them all, and stringing curses he turns, walks into the kitchen. In three, four strides he’ll be across it and out the door.

But Shirley Anne will not be denied, she won’t allow it to end. She leaps after Chuck, grabs his hair and yanks him to a stop. He tries to tear her loose, fights her kicks and shrieking; he is sliding on the cork floor in his stocking feet; she has him bent over as he slowly drags her towards the door, straining low, but she knows hair fighting—she has him good and tight and he slips, falls to his knees, she is kicking at him and he reaches up, he has fists big enough to drive her through the wall.

“You stupid cunt, let go!”

And Yvonne makes the mistake of her life: she wants nothing but Chuck out of the house, and she straightens up, she jumps in to separate them so he will go, be gone, vanished.

But when she tries to get between them, Chuck explodes into a frenzy; he forgets Shirley Anne yanking his hair and kicking him, and instead hammers Yvonne. Instinctively she hits him back. Chuck has his fist in her hair as she falls under him, he’s bent under Shirley Anne, and they are sliding on the kitchen floor. Yvonne shouts at Shirley Anne and Chuck to stop, for Dwa to come and break this up, and finally she hears Dwa yell, “Let go of my wife!”

Dwa is there, yanking at them, and then Ernie too, but punching, all five in a tangle and skating into chairs, slamming table, kitchen counter, walls, corners. They are ripping and beating each other into the tight space where the closed outside door and basement door stand at right angles to each other. They are one big ball of fighting now, with Yvonne at the bottom.

In that tiny square they slam and rebound heads, body edges, feet against the fridge, the two doors, and suddenly the basement door bursts back off its breaking latch, opening like a gigantic maw, steep steps slanting down into blackness. And inexplicable to Yvonne, she is still at the bottom of the pile and can see nothing, as they struggle to untangle themselves from each other, even as they seem about to break apart, it is Chuck who is on the lip of the top step of the basement. Who topples over, and falls. Disappears into the ominous thuds of his falling.

Three men beating each other always make a lot of noise, but contained in a short, narrow basement it is even louder. Ernie has charged down after Chuck, yelling to Dwa, who has followed. But Yvonne wants no part of this, she wants it gone; maybe it will vanish if she pulls the basement door shut. So she does that.

Shirley Anne is shadow-boxing around the kitchen, punching air hard each time a heavy slam or grunt sounds through the floor. “Yeah! Hit the fucker.”

But sometimes there is silence below, an ominous space of … nothing … and Yvonne is afraid. It seems more likely that Chuck is giving it to Dwa and Ernie; she has no faith in either as fighters. Out of such a sudden silence Chuck may suddenly jerk the basement door open, loom up into the kitchen.