Evangeline (2 page)

Ted slipped the lantern over a peg then pulled the door shut and got busy unbuckling his belt.

“I don’t want you talkin’, understand?” 

Angeline looked at him blankly.  In the dim, yellowish light Ted was chewing his bottom lip, studying her with a hungry look as he unzipped his pants. 

“You don’t talk,” he repeated.  “Just do as I tell you.”

The pants slipped to the dirt floor.  Black briefs followed.  He was already hard. 

“Alright, baby doll.  Get on it.”

That was my cue.

Now friends, before
I
continue with the gruesome details of that romantic evening, I think it’s time I explained how things worked with Angeline and me.

You’re familiar, I’m sure, with those Hollywood stunt doubles-- the ones who stand-in and take an ass-pounding so the stars don’t have to?  Well, think of Angeline as the movie star, and your faithful servant as the poor schmuck who got her ass pounded.  Before Sister’s knees even hit the dirt, she’d gone bye-bye from the world and yours truly had assumed the position. 

And that was how our little tag-team worked.  From that first time at age eleven, I was the one who got her knees dirty, who lived the nightmares so Angeline didn’t have to.  Yes, it was a shit job.  Of course my life sucked.  But I never fought it.  When Sister asked me out to play, I was there for her.  I played... and I took one for the team. 

For services rendered no thanks were asked and none would ever be given.  Because the truth is, while I knew Angeline--knew her every intimate thought and felt every emotion--Angeline did not know me.  We were strangers, passing each other on a changing shift.  Yours truly was nothing more than a slight headache upon awakening and a faded, unpleasant dream best forgot.  

As you might imagine, this was a terribly dark and ugly existence for your devoted servant, and it seemed I was fated to go through life that way, stepping from one horrific nightmare into the next, until a remarkable thing happened.

After Stepfather was done pounding on the back door, he turned me around and had me take him into my mouth.  This we had done countless times before.  But that night, as I knelt in the dirt of the storm cellar, I had an epiphany.  Don’t ask me to explain it.  I can’t.  The only thing I can equate it to is the experience a born-again trucker once described to me at the Cubby’s truck stop out on Highway 20.  

I was pumping gas to fry the Brower boys that night when the trucker rolled in driving an eighteen-wheeler.  A large crucifix was welded to the rig’s front grill and trimmed with a strip of tiny blue lights like you sometimes see around license plates.  The old man had come for diesel and to proselytize for Jesus.

I tried to ignore him but he persisted in sharing his testimony; how he was hauling freight on an Oklahoma interstate, his life a shambles.  The wife had left him, the kids despised him, and his only friend Max, a mongrel that rode in the cab beside him, had chased a jackrabbit onto the interstate and run headlong into a Winnebago.  This was one sorry specimen, boys and girls-- a lost soul at the end of his rope, awash in alcohol, depression and sinful thoughts.  But at his lowest of lows, as the man contemplated ending himself against a bridge abutment, he prayed for divine intervention and Christ Almighty came a-swinging.

“He kicked ol’ Satan out of that cab,” preached the trucker with that vacuous grin of the newly converted, “And when I looked in my side view mirror, I saw that sumbitch bouncing on his tail by the side of the road.  Praise Jesus, that was the day our Lord and Savior came into my life.”  Then he pressed a pocket-sized Bible into my hand and God blessed me.

I’m not sure what that dude was smoking, but I can certainly relate to the experience.  Because something spiritual happened to me that night beneath Elvira’s wig.  It came like a divine shot of crystal clarity.  As I knelt there with that silly cock in my mouth I suddenly felt empowered, free at last to control my own destiny.  And in that glorious, life-changing instant, I knew exactly what to do.  Good ol’ Ted didn’t know it yet, but his fantasy chick was about to become his worst fucking nightmare.

“Look out, Elvira,” his voice quivered.  “Here I come.”

I lifted my eyes.  The sonofabitch was watching me slack jawed, his right hand pressed down against the top of the wig.  I recognized the look.  He was ready to pop. 

And that’s when I went all Jaws on that motherfucker.

My teeth clamped down hard.  Ted started howling and beating his fists against my head trying to make me let go.  But I took the blows and kept grinding away, chewing through meat and muscle until the man finally tore loose and fell twisting in the dirt, clutching his bloody stump and screeching like a cat in a combine.  After he’d finished spinning circles on the ground like Curly from The Three Stooges, he found his dick where I’d spit it and staggered up the stairs in a panic, pants hugging his knees and cock in hand.

The man ended up in emergency surgery down in Omaha where doctors tried reattaching his weenie.  But the operation didn’t take, the prick died, and forever-after Ted had to pee sitting on his ass.  I really couldn’t say what bullshit excuse the good deputy slung the doctors as they wheeled him into surgery that day, but I can tell you this; never again did that bastard put his downsized prick where it didn’t belong.  That was my special gift to Angeline for her sweet sixteenth. 

As Elvira, Mistress of the Dark once famously said, “Revenge is better than Christmas”. 

Oh, how right she was.

Of course, Stepfather was of a much different opinion.  When the man checked out of the hospital a few days later (and a few inches shorter) Angeline got the savage ass-kicking that, by rights, should have been mine.  I’m convinced the only thing that kept him from hurting Sister worse was fear of prison.  Wards of the state take a dim view of child molesters, and they’re not particularly keen on ex-lawmen either.  So in places that wouldn’t show, Uncle Stumpy beat a promise from Angeline never to tell anyone how he’d become half the man he used to be-- to forget the storm cellar and all the nasty business that had gone on down there.  Which wasn’t difficult, of course, since my sister’s memory had been bleached of every unpleasant stain. 

I, on the other hand, made no such promise.  I would never forget.  In truth, I wanted oh-so-desperately to remember-- to cling to the righteous rage and profound sense of satisfaction I felt as I ascended, reborn, from the storm cellar that night. 

I wanted that feeling again.   

And again. 

And again. 

And again.

Dear friends, I gave myself over to that need.  Wholly and without reservation I surrendered to desire and embraced destiny.  As I stood before the bedroom mirror that night, Elvira’s beehive on my head and Stumpy’s blood coagulating on my chin, I knew exactly what had to be done.  Not just for me, not just for Angeline, but for all those victims in the world who couldn’t fight back or were too afraid to try.

I would be Evangeline.  Defender of the weak.  Champion of the abused. 

Bold. 

Fearless. 

And very, very pissed off.

CHAPTER TWO

As the crow flies
,
Willowdale High School should have been a thirty-minute drive from the farm, but nobody travels as the crow flies in Holt County-- or anywhere else in Nebraska for that matter.  There are no shortcuts from here to there, no diagonals.  It’s all straight lines and right angles. 

This was Ponca Indian territory once.  But after the natives got kicked to the reservations, government surveyors came in, chopped up the land like a checkerboard, then invited homesteaders in to claim their one hundred sixty acre corner of the American dream.  That’s exactly what great, great-grandpa Gottschalk did when he migrated from Pennsylvania with the Haines clan and the rest of his Quaker pals back in the late 1800’s.

Their little settlement thrived once, but then the Great Depression came, the Plains went to dust, and Hainesville began a long, slow flush toward oblivion.  Nowadays you couldn’t fill a Grange Hall with the villagers that cling to that dying place-- farmers mostly, too stubborn to quit the land.  Change comes slowly to small communities in the Heartland, but within a generation the last holdouts will move on and my old hometown will be consigned to the garbage heap of history; nothing but prairie chickens, barbed wire fences and the lonely sign that rises from buffalo grass on the village line:  

Welcome to Hainesville

Population 26

Well, good riddance to bad rubbish as Mother once said.  Let that godforsaken shithole wither and die.  I hold no fond memories of Hainesville.   

When Angeline began commuting to school her freshman year, she was more than happy to take the long way from the farm to Willowdale Township.  It meant spending more time with Father, traveling the county roads in his rattletrap Ford pickup.  J.D. Gottschalk had been the lone semi-stable adult in Sister’s life; a gentle, soft-spoken farmer of few words-- some might say withdrawn even.  But at least he wasn’t nuts like Mother, or a sick fuck like his brother. 

The man kept mostly to himself, passing the hours puttering about his barn workshop while the soybean crop failed.  The farm was a family inheritance, but J.D. wasn’t much for working the land-- that much was obvious.  His talents leaned more toward the mechanical.  Angeline’s 1955 Ford F-100 pickup, for example, was a rusted out shitbox with a three speed Ford-O-Matic transmission that he’d salvaged from the scrap heap and restored to working condition. 

On a late April morning, toward the tail end of Angeline’s freshman year, Father dropped her off at the high school, waved goodbye, and was never seen again.  The F-100 was found at the family farm but the man driving it had vanished.  Mother told Deputy Ted--who came out to the property in an official capacity--that she hadn’t seen her husband since breakfast.  The Holt County Sheriff’s Department made a few inquiries, did some half-assed due diligence, then decided the man must have quit the farm, and his family, and headed for parts unknown.  J.D. Gottschalk was added to the list of missing persons in the state of Nebraska… a person missed by no one but his daughter.

Fortunately for me, the man gave my sister one very important gift before he fell off the planet.  He taught her how to drive that Ford pickup.  Beginning sophomore year, Angeline was driving the truck to and from Willowdale High on her school permit.  Once the girl turned sixteen, she became a provisional operator and was free to cruise statewide, provided she was home by midnight… which would later prove critical for where I needed to go and what I wanted to do. 

Of course back then, fresh from spitting the dick, your humble servant had no clue which direction to go.  It was almost like... well, have you ever had to take a crap but couldn’t?  Where your guts hurt so bad you just wanted to grab a toilet plunger, shove it against your ass and plunge the fucking thing out?  For several interminable months that’s what it felt like.  I was constipated with righteous indignation with no way to pass it.  Not until the start of Angeline’s junior year did I find relief for my anger-retention problem-- all thanks to a lunchroom conversation my sister overheard in the school cafeteria.

As she so often did, Angeline was eavesdropping on the next table where several of the “popular” girls were eating lunch.  I hate to perpetuate the bad girl cliché, but most of those bitches were cheerleaders.  Cheer captain Brianna Dresner, a redheaded cunt with a pony-tail (sorry but it’s true), was telling her girlfriends that a recently paroled sex offender had moved into Middle Branch just a few miles from the high school.  Brianna’s mom had verified it on the Internet, and wanted to warn her daughter’s classmates, and their parents, about this dangerous predator lurking in the neighborhood.

“That’s pretty creepy,” opinioned Danielle, the snooty girl who had laughed out loud when Angeline peed her pants in third grade.  “Where does he live?”

Angeline put a straw to her lips and leaned closer, pretending to sip from a carton of milk.  In those days I usually allowed Sister to turn my thoughts aside without much difficulty, but if I really wanted to get in her head--like that day in the cafeteria--I was pretty good at pulling her strings.  And for reasons that will soon become obvious, I was intensely curious to know more about this pervert in our midst.

“I forget the address exactly,” sighed Brianna, already bored with the subject.  “Somewhere in Middle Branch.  Check it yourself.”

“What’s that website again?” asked one of the girls.

“Sex Registry something or other,” came Brianna’s garbled reply.  She had lost interest now and gone back to eating her mac and cheese. 

Talk soon turned to boys and reality television and other vacuous topics that held zero interest for either myself or Angeline, so she cleared her tray, slipped from the cafeteria and headed for the library on the second floor-- home to the only computer in school with student accessible Internet. 

Back at the farm, Angeline wasn’t permitted online.  In fact, there were no computers to be found in the house at all.  Mother had a terrible phobia of cyberspace, convinced it would invite the devil into the house of Gottschalk-- blind to the fact, of course, that she’d already let him through the door on the day she remarried.  

Sister pulled up a chair at the keyboard and typed the words “Sex Registry” into the search bar.  She was half-expecting a barrage of pornography sites, but appearing first on the Google list was the United States Department of Justice’s National Sex Offender Registry.  The registry was a public information database of sex offenders that had done time for violent sex crimes then been released back to society. 

A quick search revealed that the state of Nebraska was home to nearly eight hundred of these scumbags.  Holt County hosted nine, including the one in Willowdale Township who was keeping Brianna’s mom awake nights. 

To look at his mug shot you’d never know Harland Lee Wade was a monumental piece of shit.  Just like Uncle Stumpy, the Kansas native looked like anyone you might pass on the street.  But Harland Lee wasn’t just anyone.  The forty-two year old had done seven years on a felony charge of immoral and indecent acts with a child.  When Angeline dug deeper, she uncovered a reference to Wade in a Kansas City newspaper.  The pervie had been up for early parole but the grandparents stood in the way-- and for good reason.  Their son-in-law had videotaped himself sodomizing his six year-old daughter then uploaded the footage to a pedophile website. 

Yeah, you heard that right.  The cocksucker did that to his own kid.

Lovely man, that Harland.

All nine of Holt County’s registered sex offenders were “Level Threes”, which meant they were considered high risk to offend again.  This news shouldn’t surprise anyone that’s ever been assaulted by one of these rehabbed pricks.  My friends, I know something about compulsive urges, oh, yes I do.  And I can tell you there’s no cure for a hard-core pervie.  Locking them up and running them through therapy doesn’t fix the wiring.  Once they’re out, they’ll eventually follow the old urges and someone else will get brutalized.  In my opinion there’s only two ways to stop serial rapists and pedophiles.    

Chop off their nuts or take the bastards out.

Lucky for me, every registered sex offender in Holt County had their home address listed with a handy map showing the way.  You would have thought the state of Nebraska was encouraging me to make house calls on those bastards except for this bold-face warning: SEX OFFENDER REGISTRY INFORMATION SHALL NOT BE USED TO RETALIATE AGAINST THE REGISTRANTS, THEIR FAMILIES OR THEIR EMPLOYERS IN ANY WAY.

Fuck that shit.

Without fully understanding why, Angeline jotted down the names and addresses of the Holt County nine on a scrap of notebook paper then signed off the computer and left the library.  She was down the stairs and headed for her locker when she heard the sound of shoes scuffing the waxed linoleum close behind her.

The girl’s shoulders tensed.  Sister knew what was coming next.  In a moment came the first bark, followed by a series of yips and howls.  The pack of boys trailed Angeline the length of the hallway, baying at her backside, before surrounding her at her locker.

When she tried opening it to gather her books, a sudden hand violently slammed the door shut.  Sister held her breath and looked straight ahead.  She didn’t have to turn to know whose hand it was.   

“G-G-G-Gottshit...” stammered a familiar voice, twisting the family name into the same stuttering mantra my sister had endured countless times before.  “G-G-G-Gottshit.”

I had a pet name for the cruel leader of that pack.  Admittedly it was a bit coarse and unimaginative, but I thought it appropriate and to the point. 

I called him “The Asshole”.

Billy Quinn was a nineteen year-old senior athlete who should have graduated two years earlier.  Unfortunately for Angeline, her tormentor was held back in the seventh and ninth grades--first for skipping too many classes and then for beating the vice principal with a wooden map pointer.  This made him at least a year older, and that much stronger, than everyone else in school. 

He stood six feet four inches tall and stoop-shouldered, with his head thrown forward, his arms covered with scars and a body corded in muscle from his acne-pocked neck to the tops of his leather jackboots.  Uneven, home-barbered hair framed a lean face and alert green eyes, like a predatory animal.  But it was Billy’s smile that people remembered most-- those thin lips curled into a contemptuous sneer for the world and everyone in it.

On Friday nights in the fall, The Asshole brought his sweet disposition to the football field where, as middle linebacker for the Willowdale Buffalos, he was given carte-blanche to injure human beings without fear of incarceration.  Rumor had it that Nebraska State University in Lincoln wanted him for their football program should he ever graduate.  Cornhusker football was practically a religion in Nebraska, and Lincoln was the sports mecca every local jock aspired to.  But Billy had no interest in higher education or playing football for the Cornhuskers.  He was perfectly content spending the rest of his days in Holt County, making life miserable for anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path. 

Most unfortunate of all was Angeline, The Asshole’s favorite target.  Since freshman year, he’d hunted my poor sister through the halls like a ravenous lion stalks the weakest in the herd.  Of course she wasn’t the only female that boy preyed upon.  Some girls he forced against lockers and fondled, others were pinned spread-eagled to the floor and dry-humped.  Billy Quinn’s victims seldom struggled, and they never complained.  To do so would only have invited more attention… and even worse punishment. 

When it came to my sister, though, The Asshole took a more insidious approach.  Angeline was never physically manhandled like the other girls.  Instead he mentally wore her down--day after day, month after month and year after year--until the pitiable thing was reduced to a wretched little mouse scurrying along the corridor walls, desperate to pass unnoticed. 

Over time Angeline became outcast… a social pariah.  To avoid Billy Quinn you steered clear of the ugly, unpopular girl.  Even Sister’s childhood friend, Stephanie Eberhart, whose family lived on the property catty-corner to the Gottschalk farm, had severed their relationship.  In fact, the last time anyone actually talked to Angeline was the fall of sophomore year when Steph took Sister aside and asked her to please stop talking to her.

Of course the bleeding hearts of the world will wring their hands and offer up all kinds of excuses for Billy Quinn’s anti-social behavior.  They’ll point to an unhappy childhood, blame the dysfunctional family or lament the fact that he was never breast fed as a baby.  In The Asshole’s case, it was probably all three.  The boy was raised in Mineola, a village just west of Hainesville, in a public eyesore carpeted with rancid garbage, maggots and dog shit.  Abby Quinn had raised five sons in that fetid dump, and rumor had it that each was conceived by a different father.  To support her methamphetamine addiction, any man with fifty bucks in his pocket could drop in and knock boots with Mrs. Quinn.

Now her oldest boy was behind bars for a bank robbery near the Kansas border and the two that followed were meth-addled basket cases like their mother.  Billy was next, followed by the youngest of the litter, Caleb, who sometimes roamed with his brother’s pack without showing much enthusiasm. 

Yes, life had kicked poor Billy in the teeth… and to all you apologists out there, all I can say is…