ITWO FOR FLINCHING
Manhattan, New York
1995
Shelby walked past Penn Station in the broiling August heat, hurrying so that no one would ask why she was crying. So that no one would look too close. She was sure her mothers had at least one PI sniffing around by now; they’d never go to the police, never do anything to risk their socialite friends finding out that their precious little baby boy, secured from the very best and most expensive orphanage in all of Korea, had run off to be some kind of transvestite. Shelby’s eyes darted between faces before she realized anyone tailing her wasn’t going to do her the favor of looking like a character in Dick Tracy. It would be just another sweaty nobody in the tide moving along Thirty-Fourth to the crosswalk where it bisected Eighth.
In the weeks since she’d left she had often dreamed about Stel and Ruth sliding after her through crowds. In elevators. On busy sidewalks. Once at some kind of nebulous function where everyone else wore masks and her face kept slipping off her skull so that she had to plaster it back on, only she got it wrong and when she caught sight of her reflection in the moment before their claws found her, it was a Picasso tangle of fat, twitching features. Nose snuffling upside down at her right temple. An eye staring from the circle of her puffy lips and swags of jiggling flesh hanging slack from her chin.
At the corner she gave an old bum sitting against the station’s stone wall a dollar and he smiled toothlessly at her and said, “God bless you,” and she wondered if that was how she’d look in twenty years, or thirty, or however much older he was. Wrinkled and sunken and smelling of stale cigarettes and unwashed skin. She’d tried, really tried, to convince Charlie to give her a room, but the older girl had said her age would be a problem, that it could attract too much attention from the neighbors. It’s a cathouse, honey; the pedos catch wind of you and we’ll never get rid of them. It had been Shelby’s last idea, her last desperate hope to find somewhere to live. She was sure Tyler wouldn’t want her for much longer. He was getting sick of her; she could feel it in his awkward silences, his cruel little comments.
You don’t have much of an ass, for a fat girl, he’d said while she sucked him off a few nights earlier. When she’d gone quiet he’d scoffed, told her not to be so sensitive, that it was just a joke. A lot of guys would think you’re ugly, he told her. No, not me, Jesus; I’m just saying. You think I’m that shallow?
He wouldn’t hold her hand in public. Didn’t like to go out with her at all, if he could avoid it. When his college friends came over to smoke weed and watch shitty movies he’d make sure to clear her out an hour beforehand, not to come back until an appointed time. When she did, sunburned and drained, the counters would be sticky, the linoleum dribbled with coke, the toilet seat furred with loose pubes stuck in slicks of urine. He never asked her to clean, but if she didn’t he would sulk and stomp and slam the doors and tell her nothing was wrong, to stop asking, to stop being such a bitch, and so she cleaned until the shithole sparkled. Sometimes it was two or three in the morning when she finished.
But where else could she go? She was a tick. A parasite who couldn’t survive without a body to cling to. Stel’s family had always treated her with a kind of benevolent disgust she had no reason to suspect concealed any secret fondness, and Ruth’s were all Bible psychos living on a rotting compound somewhere deep in Alabama. They probably didn’t even know she existed, not that they’d take her in if they did.
Sure, sure, just send the little faggot on down and Peepaw and the boys’ll make a man out of it, praise God.
The LIRR was mostly empty, the upholstered seats with their geometric patterns in pale blue and yellow smelling of years of soaked-in sweat. Shelby, cheek resting against the scratched plexiglass of her window, wondered as she always did if this was the car Colin Ferguson had stepped aboard in 1993, an automatic pistol tucked into the waistband of his suit pants. Did the ghosts of the six men and women who’d died that day drift moaning down the central aisle late at night when the train was out of service? Did they smear the windows with their sticky ectoplasmic fingerprints, washed away each morning before the commuters came?
She got off at Jamaica, the sultry breeze smelling of rain and fragrant garbage, and watched the train roar back into motion. Its wheels threw sparks. The platform shook. Down the iron steps, stepping around gum and pigeon shit, into the cool gloom of the underpass and then cutting through the alley behind the Citibank. Two blocks to Tyler’s building. Air conditioners dripped onto the sidewalk, puddles forming in the narrow troughs between the cracked and crumbling concrete slabs. In front of the barbershop next to the apartment, an old man sat dozing in a white plastic patio chair, his sunken chest rising and falling slowly. Silvery hairs glinted on the vee of skin left bare by his half-unbuttoned bowling shirt.
Garbage bags sat piled and stinking on the curb at the foot of the steps. She went up past them and into the cool front hall, shoving the humidity-swollen front door until the bolt clicked into place. The inner door was easier, the cut-crystal knob hot to the touch from the sun filtering in through the outer’s transom, and beyond it the stairs to the second story with their worn Oriental carpeting and the dark first-floor hall to the landlord’s apartment. Each step felt heavier than the last as she climbed toward Tyler’s landing. Her thighs were chafed, her dress dark under the arms with sweat, and her cock and balls tucked back between her legs and taped in place, a fetid swamp.
You’re fat. You’re ugly. You reek. One look and anyone could tell you’re not a real woman. He’s going to throw you out. That’s why Charlie didn’t want you, because you’re a freak. An ugly freak. Who’d pay to be with you?
Through the door and into the tiled front hall, kicking off her flats into the jumble of Tyler’s neglected shoes on the dusty rubber mat beside the doorway. He only ever wore the same ratty pair of sneakers, black Skechers with duct tape wrapped around the right one’s toe. He’d seemed so grown-up to her the first time she’d come to visit him. The way he smoked, sucking the gray cloud back in and breathing it out through his nose in lazy jets. The way he made her a whiskey sour with a shaker and crushed ice, just like Stel made cocktails at parties. He’d even cleaned before she got there, and his long arms had felt so good around her. His stubble rasping against her freshly shaven throat.
“I’m home,” she called as she hung her purse on one of the wall’s pegs. Most were empty. Tyler’s down jacket, green with pale yellow stripes along the arms. A battered Yankees cap. She lifted her right foot and twisted to look back with a hiss of disgust at the yellowish blisters on her pinky toe and heel. She’d have to pop and bandage them before Tyler saw. He hated things like that. Pimples. Zits. Boils. It practically made him turn green.
He’s going to throw you out anyway.
“Tyler?” She passed the bathroom, glancing at the creased and water-spotted Iron Maiden poster opposite its door. A withered, mummified-looking judge raising a gavel to hand down a ten-year sentence as a crowd roared in the foreground. She’d never liked the thing. It made her think of witch burnings and public hangings. The ecstasy of the crowd as the trapdoor banged open and the condemned dropped. Then there was the linen closet—her innovation—and a sharp left turn into the kitchen where Tyler was waiting.
He sat at the table, not looking at her. There were men with him. One, the younger of the two, sat on the counter with an empty glass in his hand and a milk mustache on his upper lip. The other was older, maybe forty, with wind-burned cheeks and a thick gray mustache, and wore a brown leather bomber jacket. He stood beside Tyler, resting a hand on his shoulder. For a moment Shelby thought that she’d fucked up, forgotten Tyler’s friends were over, except these weren’t cruel, grinning twentysomethings in hoodies and basketball shorts, all big ears and scrawny necks and stupid grade school secret handshakes. She’d seen them once in the line outside the AMC in Harlem. She wasn’t supposed to follow them, but she’d been so curious, and Tyler hadn’t seen her, so what was the harm?
You’re a dirty little sneak.
“Hello, Andrew,” said the older man. He had a nice smile. It made his dark eyes crinkle at the corners. “I’m Dave, and this is Enoch.” He waved a hand in the direction of the blond man perched on the counter. “Why don’t you sit down?”
Shelby took a half step back. Her chest felt tight, her mouth dry. There was a high-pitched ringing in her ears. “Tyler?” He still wouldn’t look at her. “Tyler, what’s going on? Who are these people?”
Dave’s hand left Tyler’s shoulder. He came toward her, moving around the table. He had a slight limp in his left leg. “Your parents are worried about you, Andrew.”
She broke for the hall in a desperate sprint. Four yards. Three. Her heart pounding in her chest, her chafed thighs burning. Her hand closed on the doorknob. Enoch caught her from behind just as she yanked the door open. He kicked it shut and hauled her away, pushing her back against the wall. She could smell the milk on his breath. Milk and something else, meaty and pungent. “Take it easy,” he grunted, dragging her wrists to the small of her back as she tried to push off from the mold-spotted drywall. Cold metal against her skin. The click of a mechanism locking. “We’re here to help you.”
“Rape!” she screamed, her voice cracking. “Rape, rape!”
Enoch put a palm against her head and thumped it hard against the wall, cratering the sheetrock. She blinked. Stars swam in her field of vision and then he was shoving her and she was stumbling toward the door as behind them in the kitchen Dave spoke to Tyler in hushed tones. “… won’t press charges,” he was saying, “but man to man I’d give serious thought to finding help. You don’t want this life.”
“Yeah,” Tyler mumbled. “Thanks.”
“Tyler!” Shelby shrieked as Enoch reached around her to open the door. The stairwell yawned below, and at the bottom another man stood holding the inner door open and looking up at them. He wore sunglasses and a light, faded denim jacket. A car was idling outside. Shelby could hear the low, insistent rumble of its engine. She tasted vomit at the back of her throat as Enoch forced her out onto the steps, her bare feet sliding on the worn carpeting. “Tyler, help me!”
But he didn’t. Not as Enoch shoved her down the stairs, vertigo stretching the front hall into a dark canyon, and not as he and the other man bundled her into the back of a white van while the old man sleeping in the chair snored fitfully and a thin, nervous-looking woman out walking her dog cried, “What are you doing to her?” and Dave slipped between them, soothing and explaining, saying things like “parental consent” and “accreditation” until the woman shrank into herself and the van’s doors slammed shut, plunging Shelby into blackness with only her screams for company.
* * *
For the first hour she could still hear the sounds of the city through the van’s padded walls. She tried scooting up against it and tearing at the foam padding, but it was thick and spongy and impossible to get a grip on between the constant jouncing and the angle. If anyone could hear her screaming through the insulation, they didn’t do anything about it. When the van stopped at what she assumed were traffic lights she threw herself against the wall until her shoulder was raw and nearly numb. She screamed until her voice cracked and gave out.
When they hit highway, their stop-and-start progress smoothing out into the roar of the open road, she began to cry. It started in her throat, a lump she could hardly swallow past, and then she was sobbing so hard that she nearly retched, her whole body bent over by the force of her misery. No matter how many times Ruth had threatened her with reform school or the cops or wilderness retreats way out in the linty navel of Nebraska, she’d never really believed the hammer would come down. She’d heard them arguing at night, Stel sniffling and saying “It’s just a phase, it’s just a phase” while Ruth ranted about gender roles and autogynephilia, and somehow she’d thought it would just blow over, that ten years later it would be an ugly memory.
Even the night she’d left for Tyler’s, her great escape, when Ruth cornered her in the kitchen shrieking You want to be a woman? You want to be a woman? See how you like it, see if you can take it and hit her again and again, vicious little slaps across her face, her throat, her chest and shoulders, she hadn’t really believed it. It would just end, sooner or later, and they would pretend it had never happened at all, like they had when Stel caught her trying on Ruth’s pantyhose or the time on the Cape with Julian Donner. Now here it was. She’d guessed wrong, so unbelievably wrong, and she was going to pay for it.
She cried herself out after a while, lapsing into a dull, sticky half consciousness to avoid the infuriating itching of her snot-coated upper lip, the pins and needles creeping up her arms. With her ear against the van’s metal bed she could hear the rolling hiss of the tires, feel the vibration of the engine. She thought of the How Things Work picture book Ruth’s sister, Jean, had bought for her when she was little. Pistons and turbines and the little deaths of controlled explosions flashing in the heart of the hidden machine. A cutaway of everything unspoken and ignored that drove the world onward, onward, faster, with everything exactly where it was supposed to be and moving at terrible speed.
Sleep came somewhere in the long, monotonous hum. Shelby dreamed of babies crawling over an abandoned kitchen, cutting their little fingers on broken glass and cookware, and of their unformed heads collapsing when she tried to take them in her arms. When she woke her mouth was parched, her nose stuffed and running. She could feel the little puddle of snot under her cheek. The car wasn’t moving. The engine was off and she could hear the muffled sounds of gas pumping, the hiss of the pneumatic grip, the thrum of the pump building suction. Voices, too. Men talking. Laughing.
“Help,” she croaked, rolling onto her stomach. Her face itched where her stubble was coming in, thin and wispy as pubes. She squirmed forward a few inches, dragging herself like a worm toward the rear doors. “Help me.”
The doors are going to open, she thought as she heaved herself up onto her knees and leaned against the cold metal. Tyler’s going to be there. He’s going to say baby, I’m so sorry, and he’ll pull me out, or my moms, we couldn’t go through with it, we made a mistake.
It had to open. Something had to happen to make sense of the day’s long, dark blur. She was dead. She’d had a stroke. She’d fallen asleep on the LIRR and this was all a dream, just an angry ghost whispering in her ear that Whitey was coming for her, that Whitey had gotten her before she could talk, before she could crawl, and now she couldn’t get out of the stainless white sheet they’d sewn her into, couldn’t be anything but a fat, smudged carbon copy of the women—the real women—who’d reached halfway across the world and plucked her from her crib.
“Help me,” she cried, her voice cracking. “They kidnapped me. Please, please, help me.”
The voices outside fell silent. There was a loud chunk as the pump shut off, and then footsteps circling the van. A man’s voice came, flatter and harsher than Enoch’s or Dave’s. “You got someone in the back there, Davey?”
“Let me out,” wailed Shelby. She banged her head against the door, hard enough that a squirming gray thread of nausea crawled from the pit of her stomach up into her throat. “Please, mister, please, help me! They dragged me in here, I’m from New York, from Long Island, I don’t know where I am.”
The man snarled. “You didn’t say nothing about a girl.”
He knows them. She started to cry even before Dave could clear his throat and answer: “It’s a transvestite, Jimmy. Didn’t think you’d be interested.”
There was a short silence.
“Show it to me,” Jimmy said.
Shelby squirmed back from the door as Enoch threw the left-hand panel open, then the right. Cold artificial light flooded the van’s interior. Three men stood silhouetted against it, and behind them a semitruck idled at the edge of a huge expanse of cracked and broken pavement. A weigh station, maybe, not a regular gas station. No one would hear her screaming here. No one would find her if they dragged her out and raped her under the light of the moon and put a bullet in her head.
“Fat,” said Jimmy, once a moment had passed. “Little titties and everything. Coulda fooled me, tell you the truth.”
As Enoch tossed a package of crackers and a bottle of warm Poland Spring into the van and slammed the doors again, Shelby felt a flush of perverse pride, pride she clung to as she unscrewed the bottle with her teeth and choked on lukewarm water, as she tore open the package of smashed peanut butter crackers and ate them like a pig, face-first, snorting and snuffling. The cab’s doors slammed and the van pulled away from the pump, creaking and thumping back onto the open road. Those eyes, nested deep in leathery skin, going wide.
Coulda fooled me.
Blossom, Kansas
Nadine slammed the back of her head into the woman’s face again, relishing the crack of breaking bone and cartilage. Her mother was screaming. Her sisters, too, all held back by the bulwark of her father’s bulk. There were tears in Mark Donovan’s eyes and somehow that was the worst part, his indulgence in his own weakness as he did this to her, as he let it happen, wet and weepy as though he hadn’t paid to have her socked away in whatever funny farm or backwater revivalist rapist reserve the people who’d been waiting for them in the rest stop parking lot were running. As though he had no more choice in how her life went than the wind howling through the desolate visitor center and the derelict cars at the edge of the dusty, gritty lot.
“We’re trying to help you,” the woman holding her snarled, snaking an arm around Nadine’s throat. She had a tattoo on her thick forearm. Names and dates. Nadine hoped her kids had died. “Stop fighting me.”
Nadine twisted, bared her teeth, and bit her. The woman howled, wrapping a fist in Nadine’s hair and trying to drag her off her other arm. Her skin tasted like sweat. It stretched between Nadine’s teeth. Her mother was screaming “Do something, Mark!” as though the whole mess weren’t his fault, and her little sister Alice, four years old, kept wailing “Naddy!” in her lisping voice as Nina, eight since her birthday three days earlier—white sheet cake with pink icing, Happy Birthday Princess in big bubble letters—and wide-eyed with terror, held her back.
The other muscle, the bearded man in the Orioles cap who’d been waiting with Names-and-Dates by the unmarked van when they pulled up, ducked down to grab Nadine’s legs, wrapping his thick arms around her calves. “You’re doing the right thing,” he growled to her family as he lifted her bodily into the air. Names-and-Dates took a half step back, her grip loosening, and Nadine dug a shoulder into her side and wrenched her head back with all her strength, the flesh between her teeth stretching, stretching. With a sickening squelch it tore away from the woman’s arm in a long, ragged strip, snapping taut again as the screaming started and the woman lost her hold. Blood flooded Nadine’s mouth. She thought of Tess’s pussy, of the deep iron stink of the other girl’s period as she pressed her nose into the slit, and spat, laughing. A closed fist slammed into her cheek and rocked her head back like a speed bag. She saw stars.
Copyright © 2024 by Gretchen Felker-Martin
