The Bleeding Season Page 9

  Of course, between her looks and behavior (which included sunbathing in their backyard in a bikini during the summer months) she quickly became a focal point for much of our hormone-crazed pubescent lust, but it was always kept quiet if Bernard was around. Still, he knew we were all drooling over his mother, but he seemed too preoccupied with every other female in town to notice. An interest in women was still relatively new to all of us, and Rick was the only one who’d had sex, having lost his virginity just weeks after his thirteenth birthday to a fifteen-year-old high school cheerleader the rest of us could only dream about even talking to.

  Tommy had a more mature attitude than the rest of us did, and tended to hold back a bit, staying on the fringe of our mania like any sound leader. Yet we knew he easily could have found a girl to “do it” with had he wanted to. He was so good-looking it was unfair, yet he seemed to never use it to his advantage, as if somehow he were unaware of it. Donald was still at a point where he pretended (largely for the benefit of the rest of us) that girls were of sexual interest to him, and Bernard and I pulled up the proverbial rear, spending most waking hours thinking about girls but rarely getting anywhere near them.

  The following September we’d enter high school, and within months I’d have my leather-jacket-wearing rebel routine down and my first real girlfriend. But that summer I was still a gangly and awkward kid with a twenty-four-hour erection—a hard-on with feet—my older brother Kenny had labeled me. He was five years older than I was, which had made him old enough to understand what had happened to our father, to miss him, and it devastated him. By the time I entered high school he had already graduated and enlisted in the Navy. He’d always seemed wholly uncomfortable in the role of big brother, much less surrogate father figure, so he kept his distance, and although it never seemed malicious or deliberate, I saw him just often enough to miss him, and frequently felt like an only child. He left home and joined the Navy at the end of that summer of 1975 and never looked back. From that point forward my memories of my brother consisted mostly of postcards he’d send from points all over the globe, and the one or two times a year I’d actually see him, when he’d blow into town for a day or two then head right back out on a ship to some distant locale.

  A lot happened that summer—a lot changed, and memories were abundant—but on this night, sitting amidst the pale glow of security nightlights in that drab used car dealership, sipping beer and thinking back, I focused on one particular afternoon.

  * * *

  We moved through the forest purposefully, striding quickly along the path until we reached an incline and finally a large clearing more than fifty yards in. Perhaps fifteen feet high and set on a circular cement platform stood an old stone fireplace. In years past, when this particular stretch of state forest had been a popular camping area, the fireplace had been a necessary intrusion to the natural setting that kept fires set by the hordes of campers who descended on the area each summer safely contained. But due to the continued growth of residential lots being sold and built upon, along with the emergence a few years prior of a more modern campground on the other side of town, this patch of woods had been all but forgotten. Here, the forest had been thinned out considerably, and the new house lots were slowly closing in, but the appeal for us was that you could still reach this relatively private area quickly, in less than five minutes in fact, from the center of town.

  Once we’d reached the fireplace I stopped, surveyed the surrounding area for witnesses then gave Bernard the go-ahead nod.

  He crouched down in front of the fireplace, removed several round stones blocking the front then reached his hand inside up to the elbow. It returned holding a magazine concealed in clear plastic. My heart skipped a beat—it was true. Bernard hadn’t been making it up.

  “Holy shit,” I mumbled, “is that it?”

  Bernard scrambled away from the fireplace and plunked down onto a bed of pine needles, eyes blinking rapidly behind thick lenses of glass. “Check it out.”

  I sat next to him. The sides of the plastic bag were blurred from condensation and dirt. “How long has it been in there?”

  “Couple days.” Bernard laid the bag across his lap and set to opening it as if handling fine china. “I didn’t want to risk leaving it at home. If my mother finds this she’ll freak out.”

  Bernard had claimed he’d come into possession of a certain magazine, one that supposedly made Playboy look like a comic book in comparison. He had not mentioned this magazine to anyone but me, or so he claimed, but you could never be totally sure with Bernard. His lies were never malicious, but they were often plentiful, and it left even close friends like me off guard at times as to when he was or wasn’t telling the absolute truth. I’d been very leery when he’d first mentioned it that morning—a magazine so intense he couldn’t keep it at home, couldn’t tell anyone but his closest friends about because it was so bad—the whole thing reeked of a Bernard story. But, here we were.

  I looked around, abruptly aware of how quiet the forest was but for the occasional cackle of a bird or the windy echo of a car speeding past on the nearby highway.

  “OK, we gotta go easy with it because it’s not in the greatest shape.” Bernard carefully removed what appeared to be a very old magazine from the plastic sleeve. On the cover was a black and white photograph of a blonde woman tied to a wooden chair. She wore a bra, panties, garter belt, stockings and high heels, and some sort of leather harness similar to a horse’s bit had been attached to her mouth. At first glance she looked like a typical model on one of the “true crime” or “detective” magazines we’d managed to get a hold of in the past, magazines featuring scantily clad women and headlines like Knife-Wielding Sex Fiend Tortures Bubbly Blondes! (Or some equally lurid blurb), and yet, even initially it seemed different somehow. The look in this woman’s eyes didn’t look posed or phony like the models I’d seen before. She looked genuinely terrified. My eyes shifted quickly to the words in bold red letters above her picture: BITCHES IN HEAT. The cover was cracked in several places, faded with age and dog-eared, and I couldn’t find a price listed anywhere. It had something of an amateur look to it, not a nice slick and glossy cover, like most magazines I’d seen in stores or on the newsstands.

  “You’re not gonna fucking believe this.” Bernard laughed, sounding more guttural than gleeful. “It’s from the ’60s, I guess, and it’s illegal.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Chuckie DiNunzio.”

  “Figures.”

  “I was gonna buy another Penthouse or something, but I asked if he had any other stuff, you know, better stuff where the girls were doing shit instead of just laying there. Porno.”

  “Yeah, dip-shit, I know what it’s called.”

  Bernard gave a wide grin. “Anyway, Chuckie said he had some underground stuff that used to belong to his old man. He said there was a big stack of them buried under a bunch of crap down in his basement, so he took me down there and let me go through them. Man, I was freaking out, thinking Chuckie’s old man might show up, but Chuckie said the magazines had been down there so long his old man probably didn’t even remember they were there. Anyway, I went through them real quick and picked one out. I didn’t even know what was in it until I got a chance to sit down by myself and check it out, and then—ohhh, baby!”

  I elbowed him lightly and laughed. “You’re such a fucking goof, Bernard, I swear to God.”

  He laughed too, but quickly grew serious. “Hey, Chuckie says if they catch you with stuff this bad you’re screwed royal.”

  I shrugged. “Chuckie DiNunzio’s a moron.”

  “It was more expensive than the other ones, too,” Bernard said as if he hadn’t heard me. “Twenty bucks.”

  “Twenty bucks? Where the hell you get that much cash?”

  “Lifted it out of my mother’s purse.”

  “She’s gonna miss that much, you fucking idiot.”

  “She already asked if I took it,” he said through a smile. “I
just said no and she believed me.”

  I shook my head. “You’re nuts, man.”

  “Hey, don’t tell anybody about the magazine, OK? Chuckie said if it got back to him that I told anybody where I got it him and DJ would kill me.”

  Chuckie DiNunzio was a squat kid who wore wayfarer sunglasses and his hair slicked straight back. From his skinny ties to his straight-legged Levi corduroys, Chuckie was a neighborhood legend that came from a family of convicts and seemed destined to follow. A year older than we were, he’d run the neighborhood’s version of a black market for as long as we could remember. Whatever you needed, Chuckie either had it or could get it. If he came up empty his best friend and sidekick DJ Jablonski went to work on it. DJ, who was borderline retarded but physically enormous and the only sixteen-year-old still in junior high school, also provided Chuckie with the muscle he needed when deals went bad or “customers” got out of line. Chuckie dealt mostly in cigarettes, Playboy and Penthouse magazines, beer, pocket and hunting knives—even concert tickets once we hit high school. If you wanted it but couldn’t get it, Chuckie DiNunzio was the man to see.

  This, however, seemed over the top even for Chuckie.

  “I ain’t gonna say shit to anybody,” I mumbled.

  Bernard carefully peeled back the cover to reveal a group of pictures segmented into various panels across the page. All were black and white and continued in a series what had begun on the front cover. The same woman was bound to the chair, the photographs tight shots; the background dark and without depth, as if they had been shot in front of a ceiling-to-floor black sheet. My eyes moved slowly, taking in one picture after another, each worse than the one before it. A fat shirtless man in a leather mask had joined the woman, and stood next to a table on which several odd devices and instruments of torture had been scattered. The first series of pictures consisted of the man hovering over the woman threateningly then progressed to a row where he was holding her chin up and slapping her repeatedly across the face.

  “That’s fucked up,” I said. This magazine was already having the opposite effect on me that others had. A naked woman was one thing, but this was dark and grotesque and not even remotely sexy.

  “Oh,” Bernard said breathlessly, “wait.”

  He turned the page and although something told me not to, I looked anyway.

  The man had cut the woman’s bra off and let it fall to the floor. In the remaining series he was touching her while she screamed and attempted to squirm away. The last photograph on the page showed the man standing next to the table, an odd metallic device with a long and thin rubber hose dangling from it in one hand, his other pointing a reprimanding finger at the still bound and terrified woman.

  “What the hell is that?” I gulped so hard it hurt.

  Bernard looked at me and smiled; his small chest rising and falling faster than before; a band of bright sunshine reflecting off his eyeglasses. “You know what an enema is?”

  I did, but it took me a few seconds to remember the exact mechanics of it. “Jesus,” I finally said, “he’s not gonna do that, is he?”

  Bernard nodded rapidly, his face flushed, but not from the sun. He turned the page.

  “She looks all scared at first,” he said, slowly returning his gaze to the magazine, “but then once it starts she likes it, see?”

  “Oh, man, that’s fucking nasty!” Afraid I might be sick, I struggled to my feet and brushed the pine needles from the seat of my pants. “Why the hell would I want to see something like that?”

  “She likes it,” he said again. “Look, on the last page he unties her from the chair and she—”

  “You’re fucking deranged, dude,” I said, forcing a cavalier laugh.

  Something changed in his expression, and he gave a subtle shrug. “Nice tits, though, huh?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Well, fuck, man, she’s probably older than my grandmother by now.”

  He closed the magazine and slid it back into the bag. “You think Julie Henderson’s tits are that nice?”

  “They’re not as big as those,” I said, relieved to see he was putting the magazine away. “But much nicer, not even close.”

  Julie Henderson was 19 and gorgeous, the older sister of Brian Henderson, one of our classmates. Everything alive and male lusted after her, and we were no exception. To make matters worse, Julie jogged through town in late afternoon wearing short-shorts and a skimpy top almost daily, so of course it was not unusual for us to stop whatever we were doing and make sure to be on the street to see her pass by. From this simple event, which usually took all of fifteen seconds, countless discussions arose regarding all things Julie—most typically locker room in nature, of course—which only further fanned the fires of our sexual fantasies.

  Bernard crawled across the fireplace and stuffed the plastic bag deep inside before replacing the loose stones. He stood up and hopped down next to me. “You know she runs right by here, right?”

  I hadn’t known that but didn’t want to appear ignorant of her route. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Sometimes I hide behind the fireplace and watch when she goes by.”

  “Yeah, OK, perv-boy.”

  “Sorry I’m not a fag like you.”

  “Shut up, asshole.” I pushed him playfully, and not with much force. “Yeah, I’m a fag just because I don’t hide in the woods and beat-off watching some girl run by.”

  Bernard staggered a bit, laughed then straightened his eyeglasses. “You watch her just like everybody else does.”

  “Yeah but not out here. I mean, if I’m outside and—”

  “If? Oh, yeah—right!”

  “Fine, so I make sure I’m outside when she runs by.” We were both laughing now, and although I felt better, the pictures in that magazine kept appearing in my mind. “I look and I smile and she ignores me like always and jogs right by. Then I go inside and that’s it. I don’t fucking wait out in the woods and hide like some jack-off.”

  Bernard looked at me like the thoughts occupying his mind were more important than returning my put-down with one of his own. “You know,” he said softly, “if you wanted to do something with her…this would be a good place to do it.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure Julie can’t wait to come out here and fuck you, Bernard. She’s probably home right now, all playing with herself and shit just thinking about it.”

  I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. “Maybe she wouldn’t want to at first.”

  “Try ever. Shit, if you were the last guy on the planet she’d probably go lesbo.”

  “I’m being serious, dick-weed. She’s going away to college in September, you know.”

  “So?”

  “So, if we’re gonna do something with her it has to be before the end of the summer.”

  “Bernard, listen to me. Julie Henderson would never do anything with you. Get a clue, dude, she probably doesn’t even know who you are.”

  He walked toward the path leading out of the forest, then stopped and looked back at me. “I was talking to Rick about it.”

  “About Julie Henderson?”

  “Yeah. He said it would be funny if we waited out here one day, then when she ran by one of us could stop her and start talking to her.” He was smiling again, like he might be kidding. “Then one of us could sneak up behind her and pull her shorts down real fast. She’d be all embarrassed and stuff, but we’d get to see her.”

  I moved closer and a shaft of sunlight cut the trees, causing me to squint. “Rick said that?”

  Bernard nodded. “See, that way if she got all mad we could just take off running like it was a big joke…but if she doesn’t get mad, then we could try something else and see what happens.”

  “Rick said all this?”

  “Yeah.”

  Another Bernard lie. “Bullshit.”

  “We’re going over his house in a couple minutes,” he reminded me. “Ask him.”

  “You guys could ge
t in major trouble doing something like that, man. Seriously.”

  “She wouldn’t tell.” Bernard’s eyes narrowed. “They never tell.”

  Something in his tone caused my stomach muscles to clench. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Girls usually don’t tell when stuff like that happens to them,” he said.

  “How the hell would you know?”

  “Saw a show about it on TV. That’s what they said.”

  “Whatever. I wouldn’t do anything like that anyway,” I told him, still not certain he was serious.

  “You wouldn’t want to make it with Julie Henderson?”

  “Of course I would, but…but, Jesus, I’d want her to want it too. If she doesn’t then it’s assault, dude—rape—that’s what it is.”

  “So what?”

  “So I don’t want to fucking rape her, what’s wrong with you?”

  “But if she never told on you, and no one knew…then would you?”

  “She’d know,” I answered. “I’d know.”

  “She’d know,” he said mockingly, holding his chest like he was dying and repeating in a high-pitched voice, “I’d know! I’d know!”

  “You asshole.” I laughed and threw a fake punch at him. “I thought you were serious.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “Yeah, and maybe you aren’t,” I said as we turned and together, headed out of the forest.

  “Besides, being a huge homo, you wouldn’t know what to do with a girl anyway.”

  “OK, gay-boy, whatever.”

  Our laughter echoed through the trees. As we followed the path on our way from the forest, we continued to insult each other with homophobic phrases and endlessly creative uses for profanity, as most teenage boys are wont to do.

  In that regard, my memory of that afternoon seemed in no way out of the ordinary. Confronting Julie Henderson in the forest never came up in conversation again, and I dismissed it as nothing more than Bernard’s wishful thinking.