“I know it was probably some pervert that hangs out at that sick place by Mattie’s,” Lou Ann told me, meaning Fanny Heaven of course. “Those disgusting little movies they have, some of them with kids. Did you know that? Little girls! A guy at work told me. It had to have been somebody that saw those movies, don’t you think? Why else would it even pop into a person’s head?”
I told her I didn’t know.
“If you ask me,” Lou Ann said more than once, “that’s like showing a baby how to put beans in its ears. I’m asking you, where else would somebody get the idea to hurt a child?”
I couldn’t say. I sat on my bed for hours looking up words. Pedophilia. Perpetrator. Deviant. Maleficent. I checked books out of the library but there weren’t any answers in there either, just more words. At night I lay listening to noises outside, listening to Turtle breathe, thinking: she could have been killed. So easily she could be dead now.
After dinner one night Lou Ann came into my room while the kids were listening to their “Snow White” record in the living room. I’d skipped dinner; I wasn’t eating much these days. When I was young and growing a lot, and Mama couldn’t feed me enough, she used to say I had a hollow leg. Now I felt like I had a hollow everything. Nothing in the world could have filled that space.
Lou Ann knocked softly at the door and then walked in, balancing a bowl of chicken-noodle soup on a tray.
‘You’re going to dry up and blow away, hon,” she said. ‘You’ve got to eat something.”
I took one look and started crying. The idea that you could remedy such evil with chicken-noodle soup.
“It’s the best I can do,” Lou Ann offered. “I just don’t think you’re going to change anything with your own personal hunger strike.”
I put down my book and accepted her hug. I couldn’t remember when I had felt so hopeless.
“I don’t know where to start, Lou Ann,” I told her. “There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down-look what they do to those people at Matties. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country.”
“I thought you were upset about Turtle,” Lou Ann said.
“About Turtle, sure.” I looked out the window. “But it just goes on and on, there’s no end to it.” I didn’t know how to explain the empty despair I felt. “How can I just be upset about Turtle, about a grown man hurting a baby, when the whole way of the world is to pick on people that can’t fight back?”
‘You fight back, Taylor. Nobody picks on you and lives to tell the tale.”
I ignored this. “Look at those guys out in the park with no place to go,” I said. “And women, too. I’ve seen whole families out there. While we’re in here trying to keep the dry-cleaner bags out of the kids’ reach, those mothers are using dry-cleaner bags for their children’s clothes, for God’s sake. For raincoats. And feeding them out of the McDonald’s dumpster. You’d think that life alone would be punishment enough for those people, but then the cops come around waking them up mornings, knocking them around with their sticks. You’ve seen it. And everybody else saying hooray, way to go, I got mine, power to the toughest. Clean up the neighborhood and devil take the riffraff.”
Lou Ann just listened.
“What I’m saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do. Not even the President. It’s like it’s become unpatriotic.” I unfolded my wad of handkerchief and blew my nose.
“What’s that supposed to teach people?” I demanded. “It’s no wonder kids get the hurting end of the stick. And she’s so little, so many years ahead of her. I’m just not up to the job, Lou Ann.”
Lou Ann sat with her knees folded under her, braiding and unbraiding the end of a strand of my hair.
“Well, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” she said. “Nobody is.”
THIRTEEN
Night Blooming CereusTurtle turned out to be, as the social worker predicted, resilient. Within a few weeks she was talking again. She never did anything with the anatomical rag dolls except plant them under Cynthia’s desk blotter, but she did talk some about the “bad man” and how Ma Poppy had “popped him one.” I had no idea where Turtle had learned to talk like that, but then Edna and Virgie Mae did have TV. Cynthia was concerned about Turtle’s tendency to bury the dollies, believing that it indicated a fixation with death, but I assured her that Turtle was only trying to grow dolly trees.
Cynthia was the strawberry blonde social worker. We went to see her on Mondays and Thursdays. Of the two of us, Turtle and me, I believe I was the tougher customer.
It was a miserable time. As wonderful as the summer’s first rains had been, they soon wore out
