The Witch of the Wood (3 page)

He stepped into the living room and remained standing at the edge of it. The place was welcoming but strangely unfurnished, an easy chair that seemed a bit too low to the ground, a lamp beside it, a fireplace without irons, a sofa that dipped down a bit toward the wall as if one of the leg supports were broken or bent in.

There was a noise from behind, an audible creak from the stairs.

And right here and now, Rudy was dead-positive that April Orr’s husband had woken from the second-floor bedroom, shock of graying hair sticking up on one side, jammy-bottoms stuffed in his sweat socks, bathrobe floating behind him like a cape. And he’d grabbed the Smith and Wesson double-barrel from the top shelf in the closet, shoved in two humongous rounds, and snapped it closed with that deadly, masculine click of hook, clasp, and cold oiled steel. He’d never actually fired it before, didn’t really know its range, but this towel-sniffing, cleavage-watching son of a bitch was going to be the guinea pig, taking advantage of a poor girl just trying to get shielded from the sleet.

Rudy turned hard.

There was a boy on the stair, two at the eldest, dressed in red pajamas that had the feet sewn onto them. He had crystal-blue eyes beneath arching brows and blond hair that lay on his forehead like corn silk. He had his mother’s jawline, and he had a hold of the banister with one hand, the other playing with his bottom lip, hooking it, keeping it wet and ajar. Then, slowly . . .
slowly,
he turned his head toward the kitchen, keeping his steady gaze fixed on Rudy, pivoting the eyes in the skull to give the illusion of remaining stationary within the swiveling base, and it was a deliberate move that made it appear the kid was measuring him from the corner of his eye, and the eyes were suddenly crystalline doll’s eyes, and Rudy was overcome with an irrational flood of childlike fear one would associate with clowns, or monkey toys that bashed little cymbals together, or eighteenth-century marionettes that had squared off mouths that slowly dropped open.

The feeling of dread was crippling, and Rudy sat right there on the floor, his long knees angling out at odd points. Normally, Rudy Barnes was the cold analyst, practical, sensible, breaking things down to their working parts and deducing flat truths, and he fought this irrational burst of melodramatic foreboding with everything he had. There was nothing about this rather handsome toddler that was actually frightening, nothing the little boy could do that would harm him, but Rudy felt absolute terror in places he wasn’t used to focusing on: his shoulders, the back of his neck, his throat, his spine. He forced himself to break glance, looking off toward the part of the house April had run off to, trying to scrape forward the rational adult at the rear of his mind who was mouthing,
“Where’s the babysitter?”
And when Rudy turned back to the stairs, the boy was no longer standing on them.

He was right there at Rudy’s knee.

He was wobbling a bit now, rocking back and forth, and Rudy couldn’t breathe. This was impossible, yet not, an optical illusion as if the boy had jumped camera frames, but he was right here before him just the same.

The boy crawled into his lap, and suddenly the fear vanished, as if it were sucked right out of Rudy’s stomach, replaced now by an overwhelming desire to protect this child, to hold him, to kill for him if necessary, and Rudy understood this wave of fierce sentiment as little as he’d been able to fathom his feelings of horror. The boy smelled like baby and April Orr, and he reached up to play with Rudy’s sideburn.

“Are you going to ride Mommie now?” he said. “Like a horsie?”

Fingers slipped under the boy’s armpits, and April straightened, hauling him up to her chest where he buried his face in the hollow of her neck and collarbone, his legs dangling down. She kissed the side of his temple long and deep, and whispered into his hair, “You got out of your crib again, honey.” The boy lifted an arm and slung it around her, and she glanced down at Rudy. “I see you’ve met little Wolfie. He’s a quick one, isn’t he? Don’t worry, it just takes a little getting used to. He moves when you blink.”

She padded off and up the stairs, sing-songing softly over her shoulder, “Be right down.”

“O.K.,” Rudy whispered back, still sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Did he hear that correctly?

It hit a deep chord, the image that boy had put in his head, the way it was voiced as if this was the natural way things should go, as if it was not only acceptable, but expected that he mount this woman and pump her until he burst.

She was back on the stair now, and Rudy stood heavily. His breath was thick and, as he moved toward her, she came to the landing to meet him.

Something snapped.

It was red and high and urgent and savage, and it was him and it was not, as if he stood like a silent, hulking shape in the corner watching himself go through the motions of coming undone, taking her by the shoulders, turning her, pulling her dress sleeves and bra straps down, ripping the clothing, feeling at her breasts.

“Grab the banister,” he growled, “Do it!”

“Oh!” she said, as if to say,
So it’s gone to this level? You brute! I didn’t realize it was such an emergency!
and there was such sarcasm in it because she’d
caused
the “emergency,” and Rudy reached down and pulled the bottom of her damp dress over her hips. She arched up onto her toes for him and Rudy saw in slants and flashes it seemed, her long legs, the black stockings going nearly to the crotch, the black silk underwear that had slipped deep between her buttocks on one side, and he squatted a bit to have one good stroking of her thighs, then went impatiently back north to rip away that undergarment as if it were an enemy.

“Oh!” she said again, and this time there was a short laugh in it, like,
Is that the best you’ve got?
and Rudy went into what felt like a frenzy. His pants were at his ankles, and when she tried to shift he jerked her hips back in place where he wanted them. When he entered her it was not slow, and when she turned her head back to him, mouth dropped wide open, indignant eyes accusing him as if to say,
Really?
he thrust in her so hard and so fast that she actually did have to hold the banister for dear life, palms for buffers, arms as shock absorbers, knuckles bone white.

Rudy pistoned his hips furiously, making hard, flat sounds against her, finishing in a series of rough, panting bursts. When he was done he rested on her back for a bare second, and when he pulled out of her he fell off to the side, almost stumbling over the lasso his pants had made around his ankles. He drew them up, clumsy and drained, breathless. He turned to her sheepishly, and she was on the first stair now, face wet with tears that had made their way down to the crevices of her nostrils. Her hand was up at her mouth and she shook her head slowly. Then she ran up the stairs, holding the hem of her dress above her knees with one hand, the torn bodice up to her chest with the other.

Rudy didn’t follow.

He went to the foyer and numbly got on his coat, never more ashamed and embarrassed in his entire life. He hadn’t given her one bit of consideration, offering her nothing for her own pleasure. He’d fucked her like a whore and she despised him now; that was made clear by her reaction on the stairs.

He walked into the wind, got in his car, and backed out of the driveway, hating himself, hating the world.

But by the time he’d made it to Route 7, his emotions had twisted down to a sick and cold spreading fear. He’d ripped her clothes, hadn’t he? She’d moved and he’d yanked her back in place. She’d said “Oh!” a couple of times, but did he hear it wrong? Had she really said, “No”?

Did he just . . .

He thought of her standing on the first stair, her hand up at her mouth in pure shame and disgrace.

Did he just rape April Orr? He stopped at the light at Hunter Hill Pike and suddenly expected flashers in his rearview. But wait. Did he not have a case? Did she not initiate this whole thing? Kiss him on the lips? Put her hand on his chest? Ask him in for hot cocoa, for Christ’s sake?

But that was “Oh!,” that clever little game where the female played innocent, as if she didn’t know that this was exactly what was on both your minds, right?

Was she really trying to escape? She’d just posed for him, making that perfect angle of legs, ass, and arched back like some perfect piece of geometry. She’d
wanted
him to pull her back into place so he could feel more in control, more manly, the wallflower becoming Paul fucking Bunyan.

But wasn’t that more of the “Go Daddy” pouty thing, playing the role of the bad girl, the spoiled brat getting a lesson?

Rudy drove on, suddenly aware of other discomforts besides his probable guilt in what was unfolding as some horrific sexually based legal offense. He was cold, first of all, frozen to the bone, and now that the car began to warm around him, he noticed that he was wet, more so than what the sleet should have been able to accomplish on his treks to and from the car. He was actually soaked through in strange areas like the seat of his pants and all over his torso, his shirt a cold snakeskin, his toes frozen and numb. He felt freezer-burned. And his loin area stung as if someone had taken sandpaper to his pelvis, then down in the folds made by his upper inner thighs.

Streets and the vague shapes of buildings flashed by outside in blurs through the side windows, and the closer Rudy came to his apartment the more uncomfortable he felt physically, as if he had frostbite. And by the time he pulled into his usual spot in the lot by the dumpster and Goodwill clothing bin, his whole body was throbbing, his crotch area raging.

He pushed the car door open and pulled himself up off the seat using the roof. The wind plastered his clothes to him, harshly reminding him of the fact that somehow, some way, his clothes were soaking wet, as if he’d fallen in the creek by the walking bridge and forgotten about it in his haste to exit the premises. When he bent in to get his bag, he saw the water stain he’d left on the seat.

Oh yes.

He’d soaked it in a dark oval, the line of his ass smack in the center of it.

He shut the door, and the wind came up so fiercely he almost screamed breathlessly into it. He clapped across the pavement, free arm across his face, limping, thoughts jumbled in fear and discomfort.

Inside, the shadows were thick like the feeling in his throat. There was a newspaper on the sofa, a throw-blanket on the chair. Rudy dropped his bag and peeled off his clothes, leaving them there on the living room floor. He needed to think about this, to figure out exactly what he had just done, what the consequences might be, and what on earth he would say if asked, for God’s sake. He also wanted a look at himself, and he stumbled into the bathroom. Cold he could handle; frostbite, manageable. But what was going on in the creases between his genitals and legs and slightly above in his pubic area? He almost laughed. Here was another paper to be written, concerning which you focused on first, your possible moral undoing or an immediate physical vexation. Yes. As his ex would have said, “It’s all about you, isn’t it?” Of course. Pain first. Ethics later.

Rudy Barnes turned on the bathroom light.

He looked down.

And almost fainted.

***

The hot bath had steamed the mirror, and Rudy kept draining an inch or two from the top and capping it back off with the hottest water he could stand, the emergency bottle of Johnny Walker in hand, a third of it gone, mother’s milk for men measuring the tainted virtue in their souls.

And making battle plans.

First stop tomorrow would be the hospital if the rash didn’t go down. He didn’t know what it was . . . had never seen anything quite like it, but April Orr had given him something. He had swelling in a rough arch around his privates, like a horseshoe branded across his pubic area and down along his upper inner thighs. And there were dark tiny dots in the reddened skin, sensitive to the touch, burning and smarting. At first, Rudy thought they were crabs, but they were not moving. They were embedded, like blackheads, part of the skin, raised up in high irritation. As for the rest of him, his extremities were fine, now soothed and supple in the hot soapy bathwater.

He took a long pull from the bottle and then raised his forearm, coughing hard into it.

His situation was anything but “supple” or sublime. In terms of the scale of justice he’d made in his head, plates on each side, a Greek goddess in the middle, he’d long forced himself to decide it was a stone draw, rape or no rape; there was simply too much evidence on either side to go one way or the other. And while the tears formed in the curves of her nostrils and running over her lips really tipped the balance toward the dark side, the intellectual in him calmly and rationally focused on the linking of arms, the kiss in the car, and especially that small gesture of going up on the toes at the banister, as if presenting herself in willing sacrifice. Oh, rationalization wasn’t difficult at all when you did deconstructive analysis against the contrary viewpoint. Theories, even those built on shifty platforms, could come off like fact; it was an old game, one Rudy had perfected through years of teaching students to dismantle oppositions and work around their own annoying logical fallacies.

It was the gritty realistic side of him that kept him drinking, the paranoid realist that made him consider what he would actually say or do if there was, in fact, an accusation. He was no legal expert, but didn’t they do rape kits as on Law and Order, going into her vaginal canal looking for abrasions, the rest of her body for contusions? He’d fucked her hard enough to make ripples travel up through her buttocks like whitecaps in a hurricane, thrusting and pitching his hips violently enough to bruise her palms on the banister, gripping her up and holding her in place with enough squeeze and press to leave marks. It wouldn’t look like sensitive lovemaking, that was for sure.