The Witch of the Wood (4 page)

Suddenly, Rudy stopped drinking mid-draught, the backlash burning his nose, his eyes watering up.

Oh God. Oh shit.

He took the bottle from his lips and almost dropped it in the water, his jaw slack, face ashen and pale.

He’d suddenly figured out the riddle of the child and how April could have left a two-year-old toddler alone in the house. Of course, the boy hadn’t been alone. There must have been, in fact, a babysitter upstairs all along, probably some fifteen-year-old girl who wore braces and horn-rimmed glasses, sitting in the soft lamplight by the sleeping child, twisting a lock of hair behind her ear, doing her math homework.

And she’d seen it all, most likely from the shadows at the top of the stairs, scarred now for life. Oh, Rudy was going to jail, certainly. If there was a husband up there, he would have stopped it. No, it was a teenage girl, watching in mute horror, a bona fide witness. The two of them were talking about it right now, comforting each other, gathering the strength to dial 911 if they hadn’t already.

At any time now there would be a hard knock on the door, men in the hallway asking for entry, a badge and a few in plainclothes, all with short, slicked-back hair, square jaws, and stony eyes, asking their questions, curling their noses ever so slightly as if the room smelled like garbage, not wanting to touch him except with their fists and the bone-hard points of their boots and dress shoes.

There would be a scandal. He didn’t know if this actually warranted a “perp walk” with flashbulbs popping and reporters sticking microphones in his face, but it would make the papers for sure. “Professor Rapes Office Assistant.” His mother would be mortified, his ex disgraced. He’d do time, grow old in prison, never work in higher education again, come out of lock-up a broken man, helpless and homeless.

He stumbled out of the tub, drained it, dried off gingerly, and eventually crawled under the covers, drunk and shivering, waiting for the crisp pocket to warm to his body temperature. The horseshoe rash was killing him, inflamed and smarting and underscored by a deep itching he knew he couldn’t get to without something medieval, or at least some sort of sharp gardening tool. He’d treated it with Vaseline, and it did nothing but make him feel greasy, as if he wasn’t dirty enough already. Normally he slept naked because clothes made him sweat, but tonight he had on wool jammie bottoms and his thick St. Joseph’s University sweatshirt. Either way it was going to be a damp night, and Rudy clasped his hands together while lying there on his back in the semi-darkness.

He was met with silence.

All night he lay awake, running the incident through his mind, terrified of the banging on the door that was sure to come any second. He tossed and turned himself sober, making multiple trips to the bathroom, and by the time morning light crept under the shades he knew at least a couple of things.

First, the horseshoe rash had gone purple at its edges, infected and raised up like a relief map. He needed professional medical attention. Now.

Second, he was going to go to the police and confess to the sexual assault of April Orr. If there was going to be one last thing he’d have control of, it was his own sense of personal justice. Considering even the possibility that he could have hurt that beautiful, delicate woman, it was simply the right thing to do.

But he didn’t go to the police.

He didn’t even make it to the hospital.

They were quills, or stingers, or splinters of some kind. The next morning Rudy had showered, focusing on the “sensitive area” with a wash towel, then a plastic back-scrubber, and finally a fucking soapstone, razing the skin raw, drawing blood. He’d gone all night letting it work its maddening itch deeper and deeper until it actually felt as if it was in the base of his balls, and this was payback. He was going to the hospital anyway, right?

Of course, it felt like heaven for the moment, then fell right back into that deep-seated itching, now seasoned with a fresh stinging, and when Rudy shoved his pelvis forward into the shower spray, blood running off in little threads, he saw a few of the dark “dots” poking up out of the skin. He dropped the soapstone behind him and picked at one of the offenders, thumb and index in an O.K. sign. It pulled the skin a bit with it, but came right out, a cork from a bottle, and though there were about a hundred of these little bastards, Rudy actually felt relief from this solo evacuation.

He held it up close to the eye. What was this? Did April have some kind of vindictive, stinging parasite infesting her privates? He was no doctor, but he simply found it hard to believe that she could have this multitude of vermin nested in her crotch area without climbing the walls and constantly going at it with a hairbrush or something.

Rudy reached out around the curtain and set the sliver down on the sink, where it swam in a diluted red droplet. Down low, the bleeding was petering off, and Rudy soaped and rinsed one more time, gingerly, gingerly. After drying off, he went to the kitchen and got a monkey dish, a short drinking glass, and a bottle of alcohol. Of course, he had seriously considered going to get this looked at professionally, the original plan, since it was possibly some new strain of African swarming mite, dormant and incubating in the loins of its female human host, immediately curling up its hindquarters and stinging out in case of contact from the human male. And maybe these barbs had poison in them?

But he wasn’t poisoned, just infected a bit by the penetration of the stingers themselves.

And there was nothing “alive” down there between
his
legs. Rudy was no entomologist, but he had enough common sense to know that bugs didn’t just sting and curl back into the home fold. With contact like this there would have been live ones transferred, eggs. And he would have been able to see them, since the “stingers” were big enough to draw out with his fingernails. No, he wasn’t going to go to some emergency room, explaining first to the receptionist, then the nurse practitioner, next the “fellow” organizing the charts, and finally the doctor, with his female graduate assistant taking notes because they were a “learning facility,” that he got quills, or barbs, or stingers, or splinters from a woman they’d advise he contact at his earliest convenience.

He got his beard trimmer and shaved off the entire triangle of hair, put the toilet seat down and a set a towel over it, poured the rubbing alcohol in the drinking glass and got out his tweezers, the sharp ones with the needle points. An hour and twenty minutes later, he had seventy-nine bloody barbs in a dish. The bathroom stank of sweat and pain and intensive finite exertion, his T-shirt soaked through under the arms and down the back of the neck.

He’d gotten them all.

Time to confess.

But he didn’t confess, and this decision finally came from the same place inside him that had campaigned for home surgery. He was in the parking lot of South Detectives in the Visitors Section with the engine running, next to the handicapped slot and a sandwich board advertising both the hours for license photo I.D.’s, and a raffle that would make one eligible for a membership this summer at the Bala Swim Club, and he just couldn’t make himself go in and say it.

And it wasn’t the rash, his own self-loathing, nor even a fear of actual incarceration, at least he didn’t want to think so. It was the possibility that it was not rape at all that stayed his hand here. What if the crying was part of the game for her, a release after the bait and catch? What if she had a husband who was away on a business trip? What if the babysitter upstairs had petered herself out on quadratic equations and fallen asleep in the lamplight? Yes indeed, what if this was all that it had seemed from the beginning, a fantasy played out, now sealed tight with the unspoken expectation that Rudy would keep his mouth shut and be an adult about it as they both went back about their lives? Would April Orr really want to admit to some detective, a reporter, a jury, her family, the
world
that she fucked some guy doggie style against the banister in the living room with her kid awake in the crib just upstairs?

And if she really wanted to make a federal case out of this, he’d have gotten that knock on the door by now, flashers in his rearview. Right?

Rudy’s crotch area had gone from pinpricks and fire to a gnawing kind of ache that ebbed and pulsed, and his responsibilities became suddenly clear. He didn’t look forward to it, but medicine didn’t always taste like cherries. He was a bit hesitant in terms of possible inappropriate workplace suspicion, but the guise of casual vocation was fairly solid armor here. He backed out of his parking spot and wondered if Bravo Pizza was open yet. He wanted an Italian hoagie, no cheese, extra hot peppers and oregano. Then he had to make a stop at the drugstore for some gum, and back home to iron a set of dress clothes. Though he’d lucked out with the scheduling this semester leaving his Fridays free and clear, Rutherford University was open for business, all rattle and hum.

Uncomfortable, yes, but federal case, no.

Time to visit the Continuing Education Offices.

He had a couple of questions for the Materials and Support specialist.

Rudy Barnes had been nervous at different key points in his life, sure: coming to bat as a nine-year-old in a pressure cooker against the South Marple Little League Red Sox . . . playing a junior high school Battle of the Bands in the gymnasium in front of a crowd of a thousand . . . asking Lisa McFee to the senior prom in front of her friends in the lunchroom by the steam table and rack rollers.

But when you struck out looking, botched the high note in “Can You See the Real Me” in front of the student body, and got laughed at by the strawberry blonde who would later land first runner-up to the prom queen, they all just moved on. Forgot you. Focused on more interesting material promptly and assuredly.

The cold fact remained, however, that April Orr wasn’t going to forget the events of last night
ever,
and that thought was absolutely crippling. Rudy sat there in the Rutherford parking area, acting as if he was searching for the right hanging tag for the rearview, stalling. Change of heart? Possibly. Nervous? How about terrified? What if she did translate the event as “forced,” but had been too embarrassed to come forward in some official way? What if she just wanted to let it go, move on, and let the wound heal privately?

But the idea of never knowing the truth was unfathomable, living week to week in muted fear, always wondering if there would come a day when April Orr’s therapist finally convinced her to face her demons. Then, that hard knock at the door.

Rudy made himself get out of the car. Like the moment he’d had the night before when he’d been somehow displaced as a dark, hulking figure in the corner watching himself tear at April Orr’s dress, this also felt like an out-of-body experience. He was a witness to Rudy Barnes’s walk to the gallows, the electric chair, the firing squad, across the parking lot. Students crisscrossed in front of him, hurrying to make their 10 o’clock classes, laughing, talking, looking in their cell phones, and he made his way between them, numb and awkward. What was he going to do when April looked up from her papers and the shame and the hatred, yes the pure and unadulterated
hatred
registered there in her eyes? What would he say to her?

He entered the building and walked through the carpeted hall to the office complex located to the right after the conference room and the men’s lavatory. He’d only been here once before, when signing all his entrance papers and tax forms, and had wondered in the back of his mind where the girl’s room was. Probably on the other side of these offices . . . I mean, how many places were you going to run pipes anyway . . . ?

He was here. Glass doors, curved reception counter, elderly secretary sitting behind it. She glanced up and now Rudy had to go in, no choice, no tomorrow. He pushed through and approached. She had dull white hair that was thinning up top, sprayed for position and cover, so a sour mood seemed rather expected. Rudy tried his best not to stutter and failed miserably.

“Could I . . . excuse me, could I see April Orr, please?”

She took her glasses off and let them dangle there at her chest on their chains. She folded her hands and leaned forward.

“Who’s asking?”

Ordinarily, Rudy would have said something witty. In social situations he was a dead zero, but he had always been good with the old cronies behind desks in the workplace. Still, he wasn’t ready for this, for any of it, and he faltered, regressed back to elementary school in the principal’s office, or worse, in front of Ma, trying to explain why he’d set off an M-80 in the school toilet, or shot a bee-bee gun on the back porch, or lit a fire in a trash can out back.

“Uhh . . . yes . . . Rudy Barnes. I’m sorry. I’m an adjunct here and I have a question about . . .”

“Materials,” he managed. The woman pursed her thin, bluish lips. Stared at him. For a moment he actually thought she was going to tell him that his plea wasn’t good enough. Instead, she reached for the phone, dialed an extension, and murmured into it, eyes still on him with what he read as wary disdain.

“She’ll be out in a minute,” she said, returning to her work. Rudy stared at her dumbly, and she glanced back up.

“Mr. Barnes, you can sit over there.” She was pointing with her pencil, and Rudy looked behind him. Of course. A pair of waiting chairs. So you didn’t stand at the counter like a dunce watching the secretary answer phones and file papers. He backed off and sat, wishing there were magazines to look at. He hadn’t even brought his bag with him so he could fake grading papers.