Under the Dome

she now slept in alone… except for when she took Little Walter in with her, that was. Or Dodee.

She had briefly considered taking all of the Dreamboats and ending her crappy unhappy life once and for all; might even have done it, if not for Little Walter. If she died, who would take care of him? He might even starve to death in his crib, a horrible thought.

Suicide was out, but she had never felt so depressed and sad and hurt in all her life. Dirty, too. She had been degraded before, God knew, sometimes by Phil (who had enjoyed drug-fueled threesomes before losing interest in sex completely), sometimes by others, sometimes by herself—Sammy Bushey had never gotten the concept of being her own best friend.

Certainly she’d had her share of one-night stands, and once, in high school, after the Wildcats basketball team had won the Class D championship, she had taken on four of the starters, one after the other, at a postgame party (the fifth had been passed out in a corner). It had been her own stupid idea. She had also sold what Carter, Mel, and Frankie DeLesseps had taken by force. Most frequently to Freeman Brown, owner of Brownie’s Store, where she did most of her shopping because Brownie gave her credit. He was old and didn’t smell very good, but he was randy, and that was actually a plus. It made him quick. Six pumps on the mattress in the storeroom was his usual limit, followed by a grunt and a squirt. It was never the highlight of her week, but it was comforting to know that line of credit was there, especially if she came up short at the end of the month and Little Walter needed Pampers.

And Brownie had never hurt her.

What had happened last night was different. DeLesseps hadn’t been so bad, but Carter had hurt her up top and made her bleed down below. Worse had followed; when Mel Searles dropped his pants, he was sporting a tool like the ones she’d sometimes seen in the porno movies Phil had watched before his interest in crystal overtook his interest in sex.

Searles had gone at her hard, and although she tried to remember what she and Dodee had done two days before, it didn’t work. She remained as dry as August with no rain. Until, that was, what Carter Thibodeau had only abraded ripped wide open. Then there was lubrication. She had felt it puddling under her, warm and sticky. There had been wetness on her face, too, tears trickling down her cheeks to nestle in the hollows of her ears. During Mel Searles’s endless ride, it came to her that he might actually kill her. If he did, what would happen to Little Walter?

And weaving through it all, the shrill magpie voice of Georgia Roux: Do her, do her, do that bitch! Make her holler!

Sammy had hollered, all right. She had hollered plenty, and so had Little Walter, from his crib in the other room.

In the end they had warned her to keep her mouth shut and left her to bleed on the couch, hurt but alive. She’d watched their headlights move across the living room ceiling, then fade as they drove away toward town. Then it was just her and Little Walter. She had walked him back and forth, back and forth, stopping just once to put on a pair of underpants (not the pink ones; she never wanted to wear those again) and stuff the crotch with toilet paper. She had Tampax, but the thought of putting anything up there made her cringe.

Finally Little Walter’s head had fallen heavily on her shoulder, and she felt his drool dampening her skin—a reliable sign that he was really and truly out. She had put him back in his crib (praying that he would sleep through the night), and then she had taken the shoebox down from the closet. The Dreamboat—some kind of powerful downer, she didn’t know exactly what—had first damped the pain Down There, and then blotted out everything. She had slept for over twelve hours.

Now this.

Little Walter’s screams were like a bright light cutting through heavy fog. She lurched out of bed and ran into his bedroom, knowing the goddam crib, which Phil had put together half-stoned, had finally collapsed. Little Walter had been shaking the shit out of it last night when the “deputies” were busy with her. That must have weakened it enough so that this morning, when he began stirring around—

Little Walter was on the floor in the wreckage. He crawled toward her with blood pouring from a cut on his forehead.

“Little Walter!” she screamed, and swept him into her arms. She turned, stumbled over a broken cribslat, went to one knee, got up, and rushed into the bathroom with the baby wailing in her arms. She turned on the water and of course no water came: there was no power to run the well pump. She grabbed a towel and dry-mopped his face, exposing the cut—not deep but long and ragged. It would leave a scar. She pressed the towel against it as hard as she dared, trying to ignore Little Walter’s renewed shrieks of pain and outrage. Blood pattered onto her bare feet in dime-sized drops. When she looked down, she saw the blue panties she’d put on after the “deputies” had left were now soaked to a muddy purple. At first she thought it was Little Walter’s blood. But her thighs were streaked, too.

5

Somehow she got Little Walter to hold still long enough to plaster three SpongeBob Band-Aids along the gash, and to get him into an undershirt and his one remaining clean overall (on the bib, red stitching proclaimed MOMMY’S LI’L DEVIL). She dressed herself while Little Walter crawled in circles on her bedroom floor, his wild sobbing reduced to lackadaisical sniffles. She started by throwing the blood-soaked underpants into the trash and putting on fresh ones. She padded the crotch with a folded dish-wiper, and took an extra for later. She was still bleeding. Not gushing, but it was a far heavier flow than during her worst periods. And it had gone on all night. The bed was soaked.

She packed Little Walter’s go-bag, then picked him up. He was heavy and she felt fresh pain settle in Down There: the sort of throbbing bellyache you got from eating bad food.

“We’re going to the Health Center,” she said, “and don’t you worry, Little Walter, Dr. Haskell will fix us both up. Also, scars don’t matter as much to boys. Sometimes girls even think they’re sexy. I’ll drive as fast as I can, and we’ll be there in no time.” She opened the door. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

But her old rustbucket Toyota was far from all right. The “deputies” hadn’t bothered with the back tires, but they had punctured both front ones. Sammy looked at the car for a long moment, feeling an even deeper depression settle over her. An idea, fleeting but clear, crossed her mind: she could split the remaining Dreamboats with Little Walter. She could grind his up and put them in one of his Playtex nursers, which he called “boggies.” She could disguise the taste with chocolate milk. Little Walter loved chocolate milk. Accompanying the idea came the title of one of Phil’s old record albums: Nothing Matters and What If It Did?

She pushed the idea away.

“I’m not that kind of mom,” she told Little Walter.

He goggled up at her in a way that reminded her of Phil, but in a good way: the expression that only looked like puzzled stupidity on her estranged husband’s face was endearingly goofy on her son’s. She kissed his nose and he smiled. That was nice, a nice smile, but the Band-Aids on his forehead were turning red. That wasn’t so nice.

“Little change of plan,” she said, and went back inside. At first she couldn’t find the Papoose, but finally spotted it behind what she would from now on think of as the Rape Couch. She finally managed to wriggle Little Walter into it, although lifting him hurt her all over again. The dish-wiper in her underwear was feeling ominously damp, but when she checked the crotch of her sweatpants, there were no spots. That was good.

“Ready for a walk, Little Walter?”

Little Walter only snuggled his cheek into the hollow of her shoulder. Sometimes his paucity of speech bothered her—she had friends whose babies had been babbling whole sentences by sixteen months, and Little Walter only had nine or ten words—but not this morning. This morning she had other things to worry about.

The day felt dismayingly warm for the last full week of October; the sky overhead was its very palest shade of blue and the light was somehow blurry. She felt sweat spring out on her face and neck almost at once, and her crotch was throbbing badly—worse with every step, it seemed, and she had taken only a few. She thought of going back for aspirin, but wasn’t it supposed to make bleeding worse? Besides, she wasn’t sure she had any.

There was something else, as well, something she hardly dared admit to herself: if she went back into the