Buried Dreams (44 page)

“Am I hurting you, kid?” the man asks, and he responds to himself with a boy’s muffled scream.

“Awwwww,” he says, ever the concerned lover, bucking his hips and grunting with effort now as the chains jangle at his waist. “Awwwww,” he says again, but there is no more false pity in the expletive; it is more like a groan of relief. “Ahhhhhhhh.” The man thrusts forward, his hands before him, as if gripping something with a great deal of force. His body jerks in three quick, spastic movements—"oh, oh, oh”—then he takes one slow, stumbling backward step, his eyes vacant and heavily lidded. “Ahhhhhh.”

He glances almost tenderly toward the spot where his passion was spent, and then, quite suddenly, his eyes snap open into Jack’s stare. Something terribly wrong there. The boy is doing something obscene and unforgivable: he is doing something so dirty, something so foul that despite postcoital satiety, Jack is infuriated.

“Don’t you bleed on my carpet!” he shouts, and his voice rips through the prison conference room like a buzz saw tearing through a pine knot. “Don’t you fucking bleed on my chair! You fucker!” he howls. “You little fucker!”

The man in chains begins to pull the boy across the floor. “C’mon,” he says very gentle now, as if calling a skittish dog, as if the imaginary boy were not bound and helpless, unable to walk, “c’mon, let’s go in here, get more comfortable.” He lugs the inert weight across the floor, glancing down toward it every once in a while. “Stop that bleeding, goddamn it!” he shouts, angry again. “You’re going to clean up this mess.” And then calmly, with real affection: “This is my bedroom. You like it?”

There is no reply, and the man asks again, “You like it?”

“Yes,” the boy says in a broken whisper, “I like it.”

“Good,” the man says pleasantly, “because we’ll just get you up here"—Jack lifts the boy onto the bed and rolls him over—"where I can show you another good trick.”

The man walks about the room and appears to select some object more pleasing than others in a dresser drawer or on a closet shelf. He turns back to the imaginary bed. “Man,” he says, “I gotta tell you, you are tight.” He holds the imaginary object out at waist level. “See this?” he says, jerking his right hand in a vicious, jabbing motion. “See it!”

The man shifts positions. “We’re going to have to loosen you up,” he says, more in sorrow than in anger. The boy has to learn. “You’re so tight you hurt my dick, so we’ll just use"—here the man in chains makes another jabbing motion, and the weight of his bulky body falls fully behind the piston thrust of his right hand—"this.” There is a sharp groan: the sound of sudden, lacerating pain.

“This ought to loosen you up real good.” Jack applies the lesson with maximum vigor, but he is not above appreciating the humor in this particular course. It’s just that for each thrust and guffaw, he emits a sharp, staccato scream. The screams and laughter feed one upon the other.

“Aren’t we having fun?” he asks, but there is no reply, only intermittent cries of pain.

The man bends to his work with total concentration. There is some obstruction here, and he shoves the imaginary object forward with sudden and intense force. Jack grunts—in effort, or perhaps it is the sound of the boy’s pain—then, like a man making the last half turn on a screw set into a hard metal surface, twists the object—there is a long, piteous scream here—until it will go no further.

“Isn’t this fun?” the man says, as if speaking to a very young child, or an idiot. “Aren’t we having fun now?”

“Oh, God, please . . .”

The man releases the object and stands back to admire the results of his efforts. He is laughing softly to himself, but the hissing chuckles are interspersed with a certain wet snuffling, an injured child’s helpless sobs.

Well, no one ever said learning was easy, and a teacher’s job is never done. No time to rest now. The man walks a step or two and selects another imaginary object, perhaps from the top of the bedroom dresser. He kneels on the floor in a straddling position and throws both hands up and then down. “This trick,” the teacher explains, “is called horsey. See, you’re the horse, I’m the rider, and these"—the man rocks back on his knees, a rider pulling a frisky horse to halt—"are my reins.”

There is the sudden sound of gagging, a startled, strangled gasp.

“Giddiyap, horse, c’mon.”

“Oh, my God, you’re hurting me, please, you’re hurting me.”

The man in chains kneels on the empty floor. He yanks his hands back occasionally, lets them fall loose in front of him, yanks them back, lets them fall loose. Now he leans forward and makes a cuffing motion with his right hand.

“Faster, giddiyap, horsey.” Leaning back on his heels and yanking his hand toward him, he shouts, “Whooaaaa, horsey!” A swift, vicious pull on the reins. “I said, whoa, now.”

“Tell me you love it,” he says, as if to a lover who likes it a little rough.

“Tell me,” he says, breathing heavily, his tone a mixture of contempt and excitement.

“Tell me you love it,” he says, a triumphant child making a fallen adversary say “uncle,” a rapist forcing his victim to admit to unfelt pleasure.

He loosens the reins. The boy gasps for air, coughs, but whatever words he tries to say are mangled in his throat.

Jack says, “Don’t you pass out on me now, you little son-of-a-bitch, don’t you dare pass out.”

“Please,” the boy manages finally, “pleeeeeese. . . .”

“Okay,” the man says, “okay, we’re done now. Just one more trick.” He drops the reins, looks behind him, and staying on his knees, shifts position somewhat. “What’s this?” he asks. Golly, his tone says, what a surprise to find something so large so deeply embedded in the horsey’s rectum. “We’ll just have to take this out and put it where it belongs.”

The man snaps his fingers—he has just realized the obvious. “Let’s dump you off the bed,” he says, making the appropriate motions. Then he reaches down and mimes grabbing some object. “You shit and you’ll eat it,” he says, then yanks his clutched right hand upward with considerable force. He examines the imaginary object with some distaste and tosses it on the floor behind him.

Jack stares down at absolutely nothing in total disgust. “I can’t look at that,” he says, kicking at the floor as if turning the boy over onto his stomach. “Ugh,” he says. “So dirty. John may be a goody-goody and Jack may be a killer, but they both share a certain love of neatness and order.

The man sits in his chair. He has brought cigars and matches with him to the prison conference room, but he mimes peeling cellophane off an imaginary Antonio and Cleopatra. “Hey, kid, you want to hand me those matches on the dresser,” Jack says, clearly the superior fellow but one who is not above an occasional witticism.

“I can’t. . . . I can’t move. . . . Oh, God, please . . .”

“Forget it, asshole.” The man reaches over and grabs the imaginary matches, shaking his head in amused disappointment: kids today. He bends forward, hampered a bit by the manacles on his hands, and lights a nonexistent cigar, which he smokes importantly.

“One more trick,” Jack says, moving back into his straddling position. He holds the cigar in his right hand, between the thumb and forefinger, then lowers it slowly toward the floor. “Does that hurt?” he asks, and he answers himself with a weak scream. He moves his hand lower. “You’d think it’d hurt more"—he holds the cigar motionless for a moment, just pausing for effect, then lowers it gently, experimentally—“here.”

Another scream, one that goes on and on and gets progressively weaker and weaker.

He holds the cigar up and to his right, as if over the boy’s face. It hovers there, ready to drop at any moment. “Tell me you love it,” Jack says in a threatening whisper.

Pain has stolen the boy’s breath, and it takes him two false starts before he can say, “I love it, please, I love . . . it.”

Jack lifts the cigar to his mouth and takes a long, satisfying drag, but it is an imaginary cigar, after all, and he is still able to mimic the sounds of a boy’s pained sobs.

“You love it, huh,” Jack says, a father truly interested in a son’s reaction to new experiences.

“God, no,” the boy says, pleading. “Please, no. If you’re going to kill me, kill me. Kill me or let me go, please. . . .”

Jack nods to himself as if noting, for the record, this new element in the boy’s pleas. “Look, fucker,” he explains cordially, “I’ll kill you when I want to kill you.” He bends to smoke. His manner with the imaginary cigar—even hampered by the very real chains—is full of grand swoops and flourishes.

“Hey,” he says, “you stink, and you’re still bleeding. Why don’t we clean you up.” Shifting position, Jack works
intently for a short time, then says, “I got the board off. You can walk to the bathroom.”

“I can’t. . . . I don’t think I can walk.”

“Then,” Jack explains, exasperated—why, why do they have to make everything so fucking difficult—"crawl.” He puts the cigar in his mouth, rises to his feet, and strolls quite slowly, grandly, across the room, smoking in a contemplative manner and staring down toward his feet, as though at a boy crawling painfully before him.

“That’s right. Right here, on the floor.”

Jack kneels to turn on the taps in the tub. He glances down at the boy, puffs on his cigar, then disposes of it, perhaps in an ashtray, perhaps in the toilet. There’s work to be done now: a thorough cleansing, a purification. He extends his left hand, then pulls it back, and turns sideways while he makes gentle, circular motions. “That doesn’t hurt, does it?” he asks sympathetically, and he answers the question with a long, bubbling sob. “It’s just a washrag,” Jack says gently, “it doesn’t hurt.”

This sudden sympathy opens the floodgates and the boy cries helplessly, more a child now than a man.

“I’m sorry,” Jack says sincerely. “I’m really sorry if I hurt you. Tell me if I’m rubbing too hard. Is this all right?” He waits, as if for an answer, but the boy will not speak. “Say something.” There is no reply, and this annoys Jack. You do something nice for someone and they snub you. They just lie there with their eyes closed, hoping to pass out or die or some damn thing.

“Please,” the boy says weakly but with the dignity of one who has made a difficult decision, “if you’re going to kill me, kill me now. No more torture.”

Jack nods, as if in assent, then drops to his knees. “We got to clean your face,” he says reasonably. “First we got to clean you off.” He turns off the taps in the tub, which must be full now because his gestures are those of a man grabbing someone by the hair and plunging a head into the water. He holds the boy’s face underwater for several long moments and stares up to the ceiling.

In John Wayne Gacy’s home, there was a single ceiling light in the bathroom, and Jack must be staring up at that bulb because he mutters, reverently, almost inaudibly, “Light.” The single word sounds like a prayer.

Then, as if remembering a trivial but annoying matter—
damn, left the water boiling on the stove, something like that—he tears his eyes away from the glowing bulb and lifts the boy’s head out of the water. Immediately, there is the sound of someone gasping for air, spluttering and coughing weakly.

“Oh, God,” a boy’s voice pleads breathlessly, “oh, God, help me.”

Jack holds the boy’s head—blond hair bunched in a huge right hand—and he stares up into the Light. “Yes, my son,” Jack says, as if intoning some liturgical ritual, “God will help you.” These are the soothing words of a priest, a father’s blessing for the deeply troubled. “But first,” the father says, “you must be purified.” And he plunges the boy’s head back into the water and stares into the Light.

There is a limit to how long a person can hold his breath, so that there would be bubbles rising up around the boy’s face by the time Jack lifts it from the water a third time. He allows the boy time to spit what water he can from his lungs, then holds the gasping, crimson face inches from his own.

“Yes, my child,” Jack says, “God is here.” He can’t really help himself now: Jack just has to laugh in the boy’s contorted face. “But first you must be purified,” he says, thrusting the boy’s head back into the water. And the ritual goes on. Jack lifts his own head, lifts his mad eyes to the wonder of the Light.

God is here: God the Father.

When the bubbles rising up around the boy’s head become smaller and less frequent, when the boy’s body stops those annoying spasmodic upward jerks—the man in chains has been kneeling on the empty floor a long time—Jack drops his eyes from the Light. He pulls the boy from the water and dumps him on the floor by the tub.

“I’m tired of this game,” he announces petulantly. “Get up.”

Jack himself rises to his feet and stares down at the bare floor. “Can you get up?” he asks, but there is no answer. “Well, can you at least crawl?”

When there still is no reply—only the prolonged sounds of helpless gasping—Jack smiles ruefully and shakes his head. He is a man unfairly put upon. Why must he do everything himself? He reaches down, grabs the boy by his blond hair one more time, and drags the limp weight of the body back into the bedroom.

“Well, shit,” Jack says, staring down at the floor as if disappointed. Suddenly a new thought hits him. “I’m hungry,” he announces. “You hungry, kid?” A sly intonation to the voice: it is the same joke as before, just put another way.

The man in chains shuffles across the floor of the prison conference room. He stands against the wall and mimes opening a door, a refrigerator door. Some good stuff inside. “You want your sandwich, kid?” Jack calls. But there is no answer, and he says, “I’ll eat it, then.”

When the ham and cheese is finally eaten, it’s back to work for a bit. Just a few more things to clear up before bed. “Well, kid,” Jack says, rising from his chair and walking to the bedroom where the boy lies, “I gotta get up early tomorrow. Time for you to get out.”

Jack yawns expansively.

“I’ll go,” the boy says, still very weak, very obsequious. “I won’t tell anybody. . . .”

“I know,” Jack says. “I know you won’t because there’s one more trick. You’ll love this. It’s the rope trick.” He turns and grabs two objects from some platform that stands just above waist level.