«For Christ’s sake, don’t stop there,» I said. «What next?»
Well, he stopped the car, beside a field. No more shilly-shallying. The girls in the back were trying to put on their clothes, but the men shoved them out without a stitch on. They were screaming. One of them got a clout in the jaw for her pains and fell’ like a log beside the road. The other one started to clasp her hands, as if she were praying, but she couldn’t make a sound, so paralyzed with fright she was.
«I waited for him to open the door on his side,» said Mona. «Then I jumped out quickly and started running across the field. My shoes came off, my feet were cut by the thick stubble. I ran like mad and him after me. He caught up with me and pulled the dress off me—tore it off with one yank. Then I saw him raise his hand and the next moment I saw stars. There were needles in my back and needles in the sky. He was on top of me and going at it like an animal. It hurt terribly. I wanted to scream but I knew he would only strike me again. I lay there stiff with fright and let him maul me. He bit me all over—my lips and ears, my neck, my shoulders, my breasts—and never once did he stop moving— just fucking away like some crazed animal. I thought everything had broken inside me. When he pulled away I thought he had finished. I began to cry ‘Stop that,’ he said, ‘or I’ll kick you in the jaw.’ My back felt as though I had been rolling in glass. He lay down flat on his back and told me to suck him off. It was still big and slimy. I think he must have had a perpetual erection. I had to obey. ‘Use your tongue,’ he said. ‘Lick it up!’ He lay there breathing heavily, his eyes rolling, his mouth wide open. Then he pulled me on top of him, bouncing me up and down like a feather, turning and twisting me as if I were made of rubber. ‘That’s better, eh?’ he said. ‘You work now, you bitch!’ and he held me lightly by the waist with his two hands while I fucked with all my might. I swear Val, I didn’t have a bit of feeling left—except a burning pain as though a red-hot sword had been thrust inside me. ‘That’s enough of that,’ he said. ‘Now get down on all fours—and lift your ass up high.’ Then he did everything… taking it out of one place and putting it in the other. He had my head buried in the ground, right in the dirt, and he made me hold his balls with my two hands. ‘Squeeze them,’ he said, ‘but not too hard or I’ll lay you cold!’ The dirt was getting in my eyes… it stung horribly. Suddenly I felt him push with all his might… he was coming again… it was hot and thick. I couldn’t stand it another moment. I sank down flat on my face and I felt the stuff pour over my back. I heard him say ‘God damn you!’ and then he must have struck me again because I don’t remember anything until I woke up shivering with cold and found myself covered with cuts and bruises. The ground was wet and I was alone…»
At this point the story went into another groove. And then another and another. In my eagerness to keep up with her flights I almost overlooked the point of the story, which was that she had contracted a disease. She didn’t realize at first what it was, because it had announced itself in the beginning as a bad case of haemorrhoids. Lying on the wet ground had done that, she averred. At least that had been the doctor’s opinion. Then came the other thing—but she had gone to the doctor in time and he had cured her.
To me, interesting as this might have been, considering that I was still concerned about the ringworms, another fact had emerged which transcended it in importance. Somehow I hadn’t paid such close attention to the details of the aftermath—how she had picked herself up, begged a ride to New York, borrowed some clothes from Florrie, and so on. I remember having interrupted her to ask how long ago it was that the rape had occurred and my impression is that her answer was rather vague. But suddenly, while trying to put two and two together, I realized that she was talking about Carruthers, about living at his place and cooking for him and so on. How had that happened?
«But I just told you,» she said. «I went to his place because I didn’t dare to go home looking as I did. He was terribly kind. He treated me as if I were his own daughter. It was his doctor I went to—he took me there himself.»
I supposed from this that living with Carruthers meant that she had been living with him at the place where she had once given me the rendezvous, where Carruthers had walked in on us unexpectedly and where he had made a jealous scene. But I was mistaken.
«It was long before that,» she said. «He was living uptown then,» and she mentioned the name of some famous American humorist with whom Carruthers then shared a flat.
«Why you were almost a child then—unless you’re lying about your age.»
I was seventeen. I had run away from home during the war. I went to New Jersey and took a job in a munitions plant. I only stayed a few months. Carruthers made me leave the job and go back to college.»
«So you did finish your studies?» I said, a bit confused by all the contradictions.
«Of course I did! I wish you’d stop insin…»
«And you met Carruthers in the munitions plant?»
«Not in the plant. He was working in a dye factory nearby. He used to take me into New York now and then. He was the vice-president, I think. Anyway, he could do as he pleased. He used to take me to the theatre and to night clubs… He liked to dance.»
«And you weren’t living with him then?»
«No, that was later. Even uptown, after the rape, I didn’t live with him. I did the cooking and the housework to show him that I was grateful for all he had done. He never asked me to be his mistress. He wanted to marry me… but he didn’t have the heart to leave his wife. She was an invalid…»
«You mean sexually?»
«I told you all about her. What difference does it make?»
«I’m all balled up,» I said.
«But I’m telling you the truth. You asked me to tell you everything. Now you don’t believe me.» At this moment the horrible suspicion flashed through my mind that the «rape» (and perhaps it hadn’t been a rape!) had occurred in a past all too recent. Perhaps the «Italian» with the insatiable prick had been nothing more than an amorous lumberman in the North words. No doubt there had been more than one «rape» pulled off on these midnight automobile rides which hot-blooded young girls indulge in after hitting up the flask. The image of her standing alone and naked in a wet field at dawn, her body covered with cuts and bruises, the uterine wall broken down the rectum mutilated, her shoes gone, her eyes black and blue… well, that was the sort of thing a romantic young lady might cook up to cover a careless lapse that ends with gonorrhea and haemorrhoids, though the haemorrhoids did seem a bit gratuit.
«I think we’d better go to the doctor to-morrow, the both of us, and have a blood test taken,» I said quietly.
«Of course I’ll go with you,» she replied.
We embraced one another silently and then we slid into a long fuck.
A disquieting thought now asserted itself. I had a hunch that she would find an excuse for postponing the visit to the doctor a few days. In that time, if it were a disease that I had, I could have communicated it to her. I dismissed the thought as absurd. A doctor could probably tell by examination whether she had given it to me or I to her. And how could I have caught a dose, except through her?
Before we dozed off I learned that she had had her hymen broken at the age of fifteen. That too was her mother’s fault. Yes, they had been driving her crazy at home by their talk of money, money, money all the time. So she had taken a job as a cashier in a little cage in front of a
