A Diet of Treacle (12 page)

Then he told her. “Strip,” he said. Her eyes widened. “Strip. Get your clothes off and get ‘em off fast. Strip!”

“What are you—”

His dead eyes blazed in his pale face. His mouth was smiling terribly. His voice was flat and deadly. “I am going to do what I please with you. And you don’t have a thing to say about it. Nothing. What I do to you is up to me. So get those clothes off fast.”

“You’re crazy!” His hand slipped into his pocket and reappeared with a knife. She watched in morbid fascination as his fingers curled around the handle of the knife. He pressed the catch and the blade snickered out. She stared at it, watched light glinting on the carefully polished face of the blade that appeared to be very sharp. “Strip,” he repeated. She was numb. “You’ve got a choice,” he told her. “You can take your clothes off or I can cut ‘em off. It’s up to you. I don’t care one way or the other.”

“Joe,” she said. “Any minute. He’s coming home. He’s coming and—” He turned and locked the door.

“Thanks for putting me wise,” he said. “Now the clothes. I’ll cut ‘em off of you if I have to. And I’ll cut you up while I’m at it.” He was telling the truth, he would make good his threat if he had to. And there was nothing for her to do…Finally, when she kicked off her tennis shoes, she was naked. Now, his eyes were worse than ever. She felt as if she had taken off her skin and he was staring at her insides. Shank approached the girl and held out the knife. She stared at the blade as a bird would at a snake. Then, after a long moment, she tried to move away. But the bed was behind her and the distance between them remained the same.

“Don’t move,” he advised her. “Not yet. You could get hurt. And Joe might not like you after I got through.” He was insane, Anita knew. He would kill her. She wanted to scream but she was too scared.

“Now undress me,” Shank said. When she hesitated, he repeated the command and backed it up by touching the knife to her and raising a tiny bead of blood. Anita undressed him. His grin widened and his eyes became steadily more insane. She was terrified. Then, casually, he folded up the knife and tossed it on his bed. He did this without taking his eyes from her. Then, as if he had all the time in the world, he drove his fist into the pit of her stomach. She clutched her stomach in agony, trying to hold back the pain. Tears came to her eyes and spilled over. Then he slapped her across the face with all his force. The pain was like a knife. Her body began to tremble. Then Shank began to curse her. He used language more obscene than anything she had ever heard. He cursed her intently and she listened to the words he spoke with her eyes wide and her heart beating violently. Then he began to hit her again. Finally, he shoved her down to the bed and then it began. It was long and bad and very painful. He seemed more concerned with hurting her than anything else. She lay inert, the pain washing over her in high and resonant waves. She lay there, on the bed she shared with Joe, while Shank made vile and brutal and horrible love to her. Later, when her pain had subsided and she was dressed once more, Shank gripped her by the shoulders and spun her around to face him. She tried to turn away but he had her vised.

“You won’t tell him,” he said.

“I won’t?”

He shook his head. “You won’t tell him. You don’t want to. You think you do but you’re wrong.”

“Why?”

He grinned. “Three things could happen,” he said. “He could play protective male. He could decide to punish me for taking advantage of his poor, defenseless woman. And that would be a mistake. Because then I’d have to take care of myself. Have to protect myself, like any average all-American boy. And he’s bigger than I am. Which means I’d have to make it closer. The knife. I’d have to cut old Joe a little.” He wasn’t human, Anita thought. No human being could act as he did and talk as he did. Joe was his friend and she was Joe’s girl, yet he could beat her and rape her and talk about knifing Joe as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Or he could decide you led me on. That’s one way. He’d figure it was your fault and get mad at you. He’d beat you for dust, little girl. And you don’t want that. Hell, one beating a day is plenty for you. Right?” That wouldn’t happen, she told herself. Joe would never do that. Never. “Or one other thing. He wouldn’t do anything. He’d just shrug it off and forget about it. Pretend you were jiving him or something, or else say it was between you and me and he didn’t give a damn. And that would shake you up, little girl. Shake you six ways and home again.”

“He wouldn’t,” she said.

“Naw,” he drawled. “Not old Joe. That’s what you want to think. You wouldn’t want to find out he doesn’t care more for you than he does for a used fish. And that’s the big reason why you won’t tell him. You dig the whole message? Any way you lose. Joe gets cut or you get hurt or Joe just doesn’t give a damn. Three ways to lose and no ways to win. You know what? I think you’ll keep that little mouth of yours sewed up nice and tight.”

“You’re a bastard, Shank.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “That the best you can do? You can call me worse than that. Go ahead—talk a big streak.”

She called him a foul name and he laughed harder. She swore up and down at him and he laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. “You’re sick,” Anita said. “You think pain is fun.”

“If it’s not my pain.”

“You’re sick.”

He was laughing. “And you’re fun. Lots of fun. And you’re not going to say a word to Joe. You understand?” Shank walked to the stove and lifted the lid.

“Paella again,” he said. “I can live without it.”

“I can live without your company.”

He laughed again. “I think I’ll pass up your paella,” he told her. “Catch a bite out somewhere. Give my regards to your man, Anita.” He laughed again, louder, and he was gone.

She shut the door after him, sank on the bed, and cried. When she stopped crying she thought she would tell Joe, and they would leave Shank. Why shouldn’t she tell Joe? Shank’s reasons were nonsense. They made no sense at all, and they were just an argument because he was afraid of what would happen if she did tell Joe.

She told herself that again and again.

But, when Joe came home, she acted as if nothing were wrong. All through dinner—the paella was delicious, although she hardly managed to taste it—she told herself she would tell Joe later, in a little while, later in the evening, after dinner.

But she did not tell him.

They stayed home that night and Shank did not show. They stayed home, and when Joe suggested smoking some pot she made no objection at all. She got very high.

But still she did not mention anything to Joe about what Shank had done.

Joe wanted to make love to her. But after what she’d been through, that was out of the question. Anita lay awake for hours after they had gone to bed. Her brain reeled in circles and the sun was coming up before her mind finally blanked out and she drifted off to a hectic sleep.

   “Let’s move,” she said to Joe.

“Solid. Where to? Want to fall up to 42nd Street and catch a movie?”

On this Thursday afternoon a hot sun shone high in the sky. Anita and Joe were home by themselves. Some two weeks had passed since Shank had cruelly assaulted the girl, and she had said nothing to Joe about it.

“That’s not what I mean,” Anita said.

“No?”

“I mean move out,” Anita said. “Out of here.”

“The apartment?”

“Let’s get an apartment of our own,” she said. “Just the two of us. Away from Shank.”

He thought that one over. “Got any idea what we would use for bread?”

“I could get a job.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You mean I could get a job. That’s the bit, isn’t it? Go out and work, Joey. Go support me, Joey.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you meant it. You didn’t have to say it, baby. You meant it.”

She started to deny it but stopped. She had not meant it, not just then, but saying so would only be begging the question. The idea that he could certainly put in a few hours a day working had been in the back of her mind for quite a while. After all, it wasn’t as though he did anything else. Some people could use writing or painting as an excuse. But not Joe. He did nothing, nothing at all.

“You want me to work,” he said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“It wouldn’t kill you.”

He sighed. “You remember what you said once? About being a leopard and you couldn’t change your spots?”

She remembered.

“You hit it, girl. Oh, you hit it on the top. Those spots of yours are permanent features, all right. You’re the same little girl I found in The Palermo. You know that? The same little girl who lived in Harlem with Grandma and went out with that engineering wop Ray Somebody. You want the same damned thing you always wanted. You want security and heavy furniture and charge accounts. You want—”

“Did I say that? All I said was I wanted an apartment where we could be by ourselves! I said I’d get a job. Not you! I—”

A bitter laugh. “Uh-huh. Now it’s an apartment. Then it’ll be, Joe, honey, we’re living together so why don’t we get married, it’ll make things easier, why not. The whole routine with a lot of yapping until you wind up with a ring on your finger. Then you’ll want a kid, and then a house, a little split-level paradise out in the suburbs, and—”

“Stop that!”

He stopped.

Her eyes blazed. “Now you listen to me,” Anita said. “Now you just turn it off for a minute and listen to me. All I want is for us to be alone. A-l-o-n-e. Alone, just us, no wedding ring, no house in hell, no nothing, no kid, no nothing, damn you to hell!” Her voice got louder and louder until, when she hit the last word, she was screaming. He stared at her, not believing what he was seeing or hearing.

“You listen,” she went on. “You just shut that mouth of yours and you listen. Nobody’s trying to run you. Nobody wants to own you. Own you! I wouldn’t take you in marriage if you crawled. I’ll live with you, I’m no good, you’re no good, I’m a slut and you’re a pig and I live with you. But marriage? You should live so long. You should positively live so long.”

Joe had never seen her like this before. He was lost. It made no sense.

“Just to be alone,” she said. “So we can live like people instead of animals. Not luxury. I wouldn’t care if the place were worse than this. How that could happen I don’t know, this place is for pigs, but it wouldn’t matter. Just so we could live alone without the rest of the world in our living room, without that rat friend of yours here, without—”

She stopped. She took a breath. She found a cigarette and lit it and inhaled deeply.

“You think it over, Joe. You think about it. Because it doesn’t have to be that way. I can get the same job either way, Joe. Either if we get our own apartment or if I get my own apartment, and don’t think I won’t. You think I’m trying to own you? I’ll walk right out on you, Joe. I can do it. It’s up to you. I leave with you or without you but I will be damned if I’ll go on living here.”

She walked to the door. “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” she said. “You make up your mind.”

And she stormed out and slammed the door. He sat there, his eyes on the door, and he thought about everything she had said and the way she had said it. He was still sitting there when Shank came in.

“Shank,” Joe said. “Got to talk to you.”

“Yeah?”

“I got a problem, Shank.”

“Bread?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

“So talk.”

“Anita and I are going to split.”

“Leaving town?”

He shook his head. “Not that. To a pad of our own. She wants to. You know how chicks get. They need privacy.”

“I get it.”

“Which means I’ll need money. I don’t know how I’m going to swing it. Like, you’ve been paying the tab for a long time. Now I’ve got to pick up my own end of it. Anita says she’ll get a job but that’s no good. We couldn’t make it that way. Which means, I’ll have to find a gig.”

“You think so?” Shank said flatly.

Joe shrugged. “Why not? Maybe something around the area, you know, because I have no eyes to put on a suit every morning. Clerking in a Village shop, waiting tables in a coffee house, something like that. I ought to be able to find a gig without sweating.”

“Finding is easy. Holding is harder.”

“I don’t read you, man.”

Shank lit a cigarette and talked through the smoke.

“You really think you could hold a job? You think you could get up every morning and go to work no matter how dragged you felt?” Joe was silent.

“Work,” Shank said. “A nice draggy routine, one day after the other. You could ball it up on the weekend, man. No work for two whole days. And a hot dollar an hour would give you forty bucks to play around with. Man, you could really move on that sort of bread.”

“What else is there?” Joe turned away. “That’s just it, man. Either way I lose. I ought to be able to hold a job. I mean, there’s a lot of pretty stupid cats working their eight hours a day with no trouble. So—”

“Maybe that’s what makes them stupid.”

Joe looked up.

“You want a job?” Shank grinned. “I’ll give you a job, baby. Sales work. You pick your own hours and you make all the bread you want. Get dragged and you take the day off. Get hungry and you work overtime. No sweat, not anywhere up or down the line. I’ll give you a job if you’re hungry. But don’t go square on me. Don’t clerk in a shop or wait tables in a coffee joint. If you want to work you might as well make it pay.”

“You mean selling.”

“What else?”

“Selling pot,” Joe said. “I would have asked you. I didn’t think you had enough trade to pass around.”

Shank’s smile spread.

“Selling pot,” Joe repeated. “That’s one easy circuit. Anita might not go for it. She’s funny about that. But she’ll learn. It’s good bread and it’s easy. You sure you’ll cut me in on it?”

“Sure. But you’re not clear on it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s not pot.”

“No? You branching out? Selling peyote, bennies, that type of stuff? I didn’t know there was that kind of bread in it. Peyote and bennies are almost legal.”