Laura was shocked. Beebo sounded a little unbalanced. “You can’t be grateful for anything that horrible, Beebo,” she protested. “You can’t, not if you’re in your right mind.”
“You can if you’re as much in love as I am!” Beebo said, looking at her. Laura was shamed into silence.
After a little while, Laura raised herself on an elbow. “Beebo, I’m going to call a doctor.”
“You’re going to do no such goddamn silly thing.”
Laura lost her patience. “Now you listen to me, you stubborn idiot!” she exclaimed. “You’ve been badly hurt. It’s just madness not to have medical help, Beebo. You know that as well as I do. Don’t argue with me!” She cut Beebo off as she was about to protest. “Besides,” Laura went on, “you might want to prosecute them. How could you prove anything without medical evidence?”
“Prosecute?” Beebo stared at her and then she gave a short, sharp laugh. “Are you kidding? Who’s going to mourn for the lost virtue of a Lesbian? What lawyer is going to make a case for a poor queer gone wrong? Everybody will think I got what I deserved.”
Laura stared at her, disbelieving. “Beebo,” she said finally, as if she were explaining a simple fact to a slow beginner, “you don’t go into court and say, ‘I am a Lesbian.’ You don’t go to a lawyer and say it. You don’t say it to anybody, you nut! You say, ‘I’m a poor innocent girl and I was criminally assaulted and hurt and raped and I have medical proof of it and I can identify the man who did it!’”
Beebo turned on her side and laughed, and her laughter made Laura want to weep. “Not man, Bo-peep,” she said when she got her breath. “Men. Bastards, every last one. There were four of them.”
Laura moaned, an involuntary sound of revulsion.
“No thanks, baby,” Beebo said, her voice suddenly tired. “I’ve got enough trouble in the world without advertising that I’m gay. I always knew this would happen and I always knew what I’d do about it…just exactly nothing. Because there’s nothing I can do. It’s part of the crazy life I live. A sort of occupational hazard, you might say.”
Laura pleaded with her. “I just want to be sure they didn’t do you some awful harm you don’t know about, darling!” she said. “I’m no doctor, I can’t give you anything but Band-Aids and sponge baths and love.”
“That’s all in the world I want, baby,” Beebo smiled. “I’ll get well in no time.”
But Laura was too genuinely frightened to let it go at that. “What if they come back?” she asked. “Then they’d get us both.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Beebo said and her face became hard. “Because I’d kill any man who laid a hand on you. Any man. I don’t care how. I wouldn’t ask any questions. I’d do it with whatever was handy—a knife or my own hands.” Laura started, staring, at her. “No man will ever touch you, Laura, and live. I swear.”
Laura went pale, wondering how Beebo would react to a marriage between herself and Jack; wondering how much violence she was capable of. “All right, Beebo,” she said. “Will you—just tell me one thing? Why won’t you see a doctor?”
Beebo turned away from her then, petulant as a child. “I haven’t seen a doctor in twenty years, Bo-peep,” she said.
“Why?”
Beebo sighed. “Because they might find out I’m a woman,” she said quietly.
Laura covered her face with her hands and cried in silence. It was futile. Beebo was a woman, no matter how many pairs of pants hung in her closet, no matter how she swaggered or swore. And while she could fool some people into thinking she was a boy, there were a lot more she couldn’t fool, and to them she looked foolish and rather pathetic. But Beebo was too sick to argue with. Laura was afraid of the way she talked, of the harsh way she laughed.
“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” she said.
“We won’t talk about it at all,” Beebo said, facing the wall, her back to Laura. “Where were you tonight, Laura?”
Laura swallowed convulsively before she could answer. “I was at the movies,” she said.
She waited for Beebo to question her further, but there was no questioning.
“I guess I’d better wash,” Beebo said. She rolled over and looked at Laura. “Do you really love me, baby?” she asked, and her eyes were deep and clouded.
“Yes,” said Laura with a sad little smile, afraid to say anything else.
Beebo gazed at her for a while, returning the smile. “Thank God,” she whispered, her hand caressing Laura’s shoulder. And then she said, “Where’s Nix?” She started to get out of bed but Laura stopped her.
“They hurt him, Beebo,” she stammered.
“Hurt him? How?”
“They—darling, I don’t know how to tell you—please, Beebo!” she cried in sudden fear as Beebo pushed past her. She stopped at the edge of the bed, staring with huge eyes at her little pet.
“I didn’t realize—it was so bad,” Beebo blurted inanely.
“He’s dead,” Laura whispered.
“Oh. Oh, that was too much. Too much…” Beebo stared at him, her face almost stupid with sorrow. She didn’t scream as Laura had, or turn away sick. She just gaped at him for a while with Laura clinging to her and murmuring, “It’s all right, darling, it’s all right,” because she didn’t know what else to say.
Beebo got off the bed and went to him, kneeling beside the ruined little body, and picked him up in her arms.
Beebo looked at Laura with the blood running all over her and there was grief on her face. “He was just a dog,” she moaned. “Such a little dog. There was nothing queer about him!…And he could talk, too.” She almost shouted it and Laura waited, trembling, for her to move.
“He was so sweet,
