wall, but it turned out the pounding aspects were only for Momma. With me he was really almost delicate and concerned about what I was feeling. (Answer: not much. I always sort of drifted away while he was doing his thing, although not so far away that I couldn’t answer his questions or fake the required responses. Do you love it, baby? Ooh, yes, daddy, jam your big love pole in my cunt! For Ray Bob had read his share of the same books, life following art down into the dank cellar.) I really think he wanted to turn me into the love slave of his toxic fantasy world, but I was never that. Now that I think on it, he was more like mine, although we did not actually discuss the subject.
Truth to tell, Hunter Foy didn’t take much seducing. One day he pulled up in his truck and said hey and I said hey and got in and we went to Sand Creek County Park close by the sluggish flow of the tea-colored water and we smoked a couple of numbers in the camper back. After the second joint we started in chewing face and I tore my T-shirt and bra and panties off like they was on fire and then I leaped upon him and like they say in the bodice- ripper paperbacks I slaked my lust, although it wasn’t until the second time we did it that afternoon that I felt more or less what you’re supposed to feel on such occasions, and it surprised me so much that I yelped like a puppy.
I walked into the house knock-kneed on account of my soggy underwear, but with my head in a spin, thinking oh this is love all right like in the songs and movies and I am the star. It was just like me then to go from a pedophile abuser who at least liked me to a boyfriend who put me a little lower than his dog. The devil likes to break his tools, it’s the most fun thing for him, but did I know that? It all made such sense to me, the shiny man whispering in my ear every time I thought Whoa, girl, whatare you doing? By that time he wasn’t a shiny man anymore like when I was small, but more like my own self talking to me with my own voice.
This has happened to you too, hasn’t it?
Well, we carried on like that for a couple of months, every afternoon practically, but sadly our idyll could not last, like they say in the romance books, or used to back when I read them, and one Saturday night when I walked in around ten or so, Ray Bob was waiting there with a look on his face that I hadn’t ever seen directed at me, and he asked me where I had been, and when I repeated the lie I had told about being out with a couple of my friends studying, he whapped me across the face so hard I flew halfway across the room. Then he told me all what I’d been doing with that Hunter Foy, in some detail. I don’t know, maybe Ray Jr. tipped him off and he had been spying on us with his police night-vision scope, and then he dragged me into my room, knocked me facedown on my bed, yanked my shorts and panties off, put his knee on my back, and beat me to ribbons with my own riding crop. I made a lot of noise.
When he got tired of whipping me he started in cursing me for a slut and how could I go with that trash after all he did for me, bringing me up like I was his own flesh-and-blood daughter and buying me anything I wanted, and things were going to change around here he’d been Mr. Softy but no longer, missy. And he said how he was going to arrest Hunter and send him to state prison. I said if he did that I would tell about what he’d been doing to me all these years from the time I was nine and it would be him who went to state prison and he said no one would believe a little white trash slut like me and if I said anything at all he would say I had lost my marbles and get Doc Herb Dideroff to lock me up in his rest home forever and give me the electric shock treatment. And I said we’ll see about that, and I pulled on my pants again.
He tried to grab me then, but despite all my pain and suffering I dodged past him and ran out in the living room, and there was the whole family, because of all the noise, Momma holding Bobbie Ann, and Ray Jr. looking so pale his zits stood out like stars, and Jon, who was always half a step slow, but looking real interested. And I screamed out he’s whipping me because I wouldn’t fuck him anymore, he’s been fucking me for years. And he tried to grab me but I ran around and hid behind my momma and Bobbie Ann, me now yelling out all the intimate details of our sex life together so she would know it was true. But he said, she’s lying, Billie, you know that. She’s lying, she always was no good just like you said. I saw him give her that look and while I couldn’t see her face I could feel the spine shrivel right out of her. Bobbie Ann just got the side blast of it, but still it was bad enough to make her start in wailing. Momma said I got to go lie down now, and she took the girl up in her arms and walked away from me, and Ray Bob yelled at his boys to go to their room and snatched me by my hair and dragged me out to the yard, and locked me in the big red toolshed from Sears. That was Saturday night. He kept me in there two whole days with no food or water but plenty of palmetto bugs and spiders. No one came out to comfort me or bring me anything to drink, not one human creature, and it was like an oven in there stinking of chemicals and manure, and it was like an oven in my soul too, cooking away with thoughts of revenge and violence and how I could get back at them all and get away with Hunter Foy.
On the third evening I was in there, and starting in to wonder if he was going to keep me there until I died, I heard Ray Bob’s voice say, you gonna be good now, Emmylou, and I said, I will if you promise not to arrest Hunter, and he waited a long time, I thought he’d gone away and then he said well I do believe in giving people another chance, but you better keep your dirty lies to yourself from now on and I said fine, okay. He let me out then, blinking into the end of the day. I thought to myself that it was a good deal if that was going to be all my punishment, plus I wouldn’t have to fuck Ray Bob anymore, but it wasn’t. While I was in the shed, Ray Bob had gone and sold my horse and he wouldn’t tell me where. Ray Jr. said he sold it to the dog food place up by Preston. I cried for a week on and off far longer than I had when my real daddy died partly from the loss and partly because I couldn’t get them all and grind them under my foot like cockroaches. But then I found that he’d moved the rocking chair out of my room and into Bobbie Ann’s, and I started my plan.
Three
TRANSCRIPT
COMPETENCY INTERVIEW
Prisoner: Dideroff, Emmylou (NMI) MPD CASE # 7716
Dade County Criminal Court Docket # 331902
Interviewed by: Lorna C. Wise, Ph.D.
Tape #: 2
Recording Started: 11:02A.M.
Lorna Wise: Now about this voice you mentioned to the police officers. Are you still hearing it?
Emmylou Dideroff: No.
W: Did you at one time?
D: Yes.
W: And this voice identified itself as a saint?
D: Yes. St. Catherine of Siena.
W: I see. Any besides that?
D: No.
W: No other hallucinations at all?
D: They’re not hallucinations.
W: Yes, well, do you still hear voices or sounds that no one else can hear? See people or things that no one else can see?
D: Not since the day of the murder. But sometimes before I drop off to sleep I hear the sound of my gun. And sometimes during the day too. Is that what you mean, stuff like that?
W: Tell me more about it, please.
D: Well, it’s not exactly hearing it, like I can hear you, like I hear the noises in the jail, or people talking and like that, but like an extra-sharp memory. Like Ijust heard it, so I get startled out of whatever I’m doing.
W: What kind of gun? Like a pistol?
D: A pistol is a pistol. A gun is an artillery piece.
W: You thought you had an artillery piece? You mean like a cannon?
D: Yes. It was a L-70 Bofors gun. A forty-mm automatic cannon.
W: Mm-hm. Can you describe this sound?
D: It was very, very loud. [laughs]
